Resources

Guide

5th Annual IBM AIX Community Survey Findings

The AIX Community Survey, now in its fifth consecutive year, goes in-depth with IT teams to gain a unique perspective into how this platform is being used today and how teams envision using it in the future. Over the years, the respondents of the survey have expanded to include a variety of industries, geographies, and titles within IT. More than 100 IT professionals in North America, EMEA, and APAC participated in this year’s survey, and this input enables all of us to understand the role of AIX with new clarity.
Article

Comparing Different Methods for Calculating Health and Risk

How do you calculate IT health and risk ? There are different methods you can use, depending on your needs. The most common methods for determining IT infrastructure health are: Threshold comparison Enhanced threshold comparison Event detection Variation from normal Allocation comparison Queuing theory for health On the other hand, the most common methods for calculating IT infrastructure risk are...
Article

Managing Your IBM i Audit Data

Let’s face it; system administration remains a largely thankless task. From scheduling jobs to balancing workloads to answering messages in QSYSOPR, administrators and operators work diligently behind the scenes to ensure that IBM i servers are available to run mission-critical applications.
Blog

Performance Management

What is Performance Management? IT performance management is responsible for everyday aspects of capacity management , like monitoring performance and resources, planning changes to make efficient use of resources, analyzing performance, and reporting back to the business. Now more than ever, your company’s bottom line rests on your ability to provide 24/7 service online. Even short outages can...
Blog

IT Maturity

What are your optimization goals? An optimization initiative is typically triggered by one of the drivers listed below and the focus is dictated by your overall business objectives. But singlehandedly focusing on one objective may negatively impact your capabilities in the other areas. This can reduce the overall service quality and offer limited to no real value. In order to achieve concurrent...
Article

Generate and Distribute Audit Reports Automatically

Despite the server’s incredible security infrastructure, auditing remains primarily a thankless, manual chore. And, let’s face it, any task that’s thankless and manual probably won’t get done.
Blog

How to Go from Simple to Strategic Capacity Management

Capacity Management Strategies If IT was like a restaurant…then capacity management should be like the restaurant manager (aka Maître D’). Unfortunately, too many organizations are using capacity management as the clean-up department. When something goes wrong, capacity management fixes it. And while that used to work, that’s not the best practice to follow today. A Brief History of Capacity...
Blog

Capacity Planning

Have you ever experienced an online service outage? It’s like losing half your physical locations without any warning. Downtime is a huge problem. It stops your revenue stream. It compromises customer loyalty. It damages your brand’s reputation. And it wastes hours and IT resources to fix the problem—when it shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with. Isn’t it about time you prevented downtime...
Blog

PCI Compliance Takeaways from the Target Data Breach

Smack in the middle of the holiday shopping season, Target was hit with a malware attack that infiltrated its point-of-sale systems and enabled the theft of credit card numbers and personally identifiable information from more than 70 million shoppers.
On-Demand Webinar

An Introduction to PCI Compliance on IBM Power Systems

Complying with the PCI standard is a normal part of doing business in today’s credit-centric world. But, PCI applies to multiple platforms. The challenge becomes how to map the general PCI requirements to a specific platform, such as IBM i. And, more importantly, how can you maintain—and prove—compliance?
Blog

IT Risk Mitigation

It's a brave new world for IT. And it often seems impossible to predict future demand and guard against performance risks. You have mountains of data, scalable cloud infrastructures, and a complex web of IT environments. It's complicated, to say the least. And it's matched by skyrocketing consumer demand for and reliance on online services. Bottom line: outages are more dangerous to a company’s...
Blog

IT Security Compliance 101

In this compliance 101 primer, we'll look at three high-profile breaches from the past year, each of which shows what can go wrong when data oversight isn't up to snuff. Along the way, we'll discuss some basic fixes that can help shore up network defenses.
Guide

Download “How IT Professionals Can Navigate PCI DSS Compliance” Guide

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to every organization that processes credit or debit card information. This includes merchants and third-party service providers that store, process, or transmit credit card data. The launch of PCI DSS helped expose serious security shortcomings, failures to follow security best practices, and a general lack of awareness of the...
Guide

Self-Audit: Checking Assumptions at the Door

Sysadmins, devops engineers, and cybersecurity personnel are often kept awake by a number of questions. How should I monitor my monitoring to be sure it will alert me when there is a security issue that needs my intervention? How can I be sure that the servers and processes in the environment haven’t been rooted already? In the quest to get better sleep, it is a good idea to self-audit your...