April 9, 2008                                                                                            

NEWS RELEASE

NaSPA, an IT Association, Reinvigorated with New President and Several New Board Members  read more »

More stringent regulations on the retention of email and other types of data will compel companies to revisit their data retention policies and strategies in 2008-as well as focusing on tune-up measures for their disaster recovery and business continuation plans.

While many enterprises invested in and upgraded DR plans in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, many have also stopped there. In spite of this, the Aberdeen Group reported in September 2007 that 80% of best-in-class companies planned to make continuous improvement and investment in data
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Every once in a while, we devote an installment or two of this column to displaying some of the newer contributions to the CBT Tape MVS Utilities collection, which have been either submitted recently, or have been considerably enhanced lately. The CBT Tape collection can be found at www.cbttape.org, and you don't need to be a member of anything, or to know a password, to get any of the thousands of software tools, large or small, which are posted there.  read more »

Introduction

As I have recently written (November 2007, Building an Early Warning System to Enable COBOL Compiler Migration), there are sites that will be compelled to migrate older COBOL programs to Enterprise COBOL simply because they must run the latest version of DB2 and CICS. If that’s the case at your site, what have you done to help get the applications programming staff ready to do the work? I was presented with this challenge at a client site and decided to follow a standard project approach:  read more »

When a security breach occurs, especially in a large organization, identifying where and how it occurred are immediate first reactions. Next steps include determining how far it has penetrated, what is at risk and, ultimately, how to correct the situation. For certain external data covered by legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SBA), Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and more, corrective action is well defined and extremely costly. Those
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It has been ten years since Sanford Wallace first burst onto the Internet. Since then he has gone offline and back online again at least twice, and repeatedly changed the city in which he does business. He stays on the move, presumably to prevent attempts at reprisals against him. The reason is that his business efforts make people angry. Wallace calls himself the original 'spam king.' Others call him 'Spamford' and much worse.  read more »

New "green" initiatives are reinventing the world of buying and leasing technology, primarily because technology that nears the end of its useful life must be disposed with-and there is a burgeoning cost for that.  read more »

Many articles have been written about the information technology employment market, but few have focused on what motivates an IT professional to aim for and stick with an IT career, when there are many other career choices.

This article discusses the important career motivators for IT professionals.  read more »

Every once in a while, we devote an installment or two of this column to displaying some of the newer contributions to the CBT Tape MVS Utilities collection, which have been either submitted recently, or have been considerably enhanced lately. The CBT Tape collection can be found at www.cbttape.org, and you don't need to be a member of anything, or to know a password, to get any of the thousands of software tools, large or small, which are posted there. I've just looked at the title index for this
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Introduction

A few months ago, an application team requested my help with one of their monthly batch jobs.  It was running for an excessively long time, and they needed another set of eyes to see if there was any way to improve it.  This article describes the analysis that was performed, the actions that were taken, and the results of the changes.  read more »

Programmers who evolved with Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) are retiring from the workforce, and businesses must compete for a shrinking pool of knowledgeable technicians. In a paper for Gartner Research, analyst Dale Vecchio makes the following observations (Vecchio, p. 1)[1]:  read more »

Now we have all wished that a software product worked differently, be it in terms of defaults chosen by it, or missing features, or the way information is presented.

And so it is with RACF. Make no mistake, RACF is a great product, and I like it a lot. But I have often wondered - would it not be nice if it worked just a little differently? Or would it not be better if it interpreted a certain aspect another way thereby removing ambiguity? We all have our wish lists, and the following is mine.  read more »

One of my favorite quotes is the old chestnut about laws and sausages: the less you know about how they are made, the better!

Unfortunately, more often than not, the adage is also perfectly apt for technology endeavors. Any IT pro who has been involved in a major upgrade or development project knows all too well just how many ‘additives' go into such an effort.  read more »

The days of loud, random attacks are behind us. Spamming has become extremely professional and commercial today. Just as businesses target the user, spam too has become a business where spammers are turning to sophisticated and innovative techniques to lure their targets - the users - to respond to their insidious messages. Just as businesses employ market research to study consumer psychology, buying trends and usage patterns, spammers are studying user psychology and behavior patterns to launch new techniques with a clear insight into what interests the user. Users are
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Just this past week, less than a year after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, disaster again struck in the form of a gunman at Northern Illinois University. Such situations are sadly part of the concerns today for any contingency planner in virtually
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In a world of rapidly evolving technology solutions, IT environments in organizations are becoming more complex and playing a larger role in every aspect of daily business operations. No longer can organizations afford to use vendors as only an IT provider and not an integral part of an organization's IT support team. To avoid costly inefficiencies, businesses need to utilize advanced technical support services to manage growingly complex IT environments, augment the return on IT investments, and defend against increasingly sophisticated and targeted security threats.  read more »

Practically every week the news is filled with horror stories of poor data security. Someone loses a media tape and with it goes all of IBM's retiree information. A hacker gets into TJX's customer records and the firm is inundated with bad press and lawsuits. Yet protecting against these happenstances is actually fairly straightforward. Let's first look at where data storage policies have failed in recent years.

The folly of physical tapes  read more »

To mark my sixth anniversary of writing for NaSPA, I decided to revisit my first article and revamp it for a new audience. This article examines how one site incorporated one of the features of their change management system with the features of their dump analysis tool to help applications programmers determine the cause of development and production abends.  read more »

This month, I'd like to talk about something that professional coders generally do, rather than something that systems programmers normally do. But this topic is of much concern for us as systems programmers as well, and you'll soon see why.  read more »

As an IBM mainframe shop, you have inevitably encountered the dilemma of migrating from ESCON to FICON channel technologies. You have weighed the pros and cons of this major overhaul, but you are still undecided if it is worth the time, effort and cost. In this article, we will examine why ESCON has been so widely adopted into the mainframe world, and then make the case for why migrating to FICON is ultimately the best choice for your business. At the end of this article, you may be asking yourself, is 2008 the year for your FICON migration?

ESCON: A
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