In today’s always-on digital economy, customers expect 24×7 system availability, instant response times, and products and services that constantly evolve to meet their needs. Whether your mainframe teams are developing new applications and features, resolving database issues, or recovering from a security incident, speed and efficiency are vital to gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage. This quarter’s release of enhancements to the BMC AMI portfolio helps your mainframe teams work quickly and cost-effectively without sacrificing quality, regardless of the task at hand. Read on to learn more.

BMC AMI Cloud Data users can now reduce storage capacity usage and cost by archiving BMC AMI Storage IAM datasets to the cloud, while new automations enable more efficient data management processing. We’ve also introduced streamlined filtering and grouping capabilities give users better data insights.

An enhancement to BMC AMI DevX Code Insights builds on our recently released code refactoring support by automatically analyzing all fields in a specific copybook and giving developers the ability to quickly comment and remove unused copybooks. Meanwhile, BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline now offers detailed deploy controls, enabling developers to specify actions for different environments, set specific deployment times, and specify how to handle failures.

This quarter’s enhancements also boost the efficiency and performance of IBM^® Db2^® and IBM^® IMS^™. A new BMC AMI zAdviser dashboard provides actionable insights from BMC AMI Recovery for Db2^® with new visibility into data migration and audit task oversight. BMC AMI Online Reorg for IMS^™ streamlines database change management capabilities, while new features in BMC AMI Database Administration for Db2^® and BMC AMI Utilities for Db2^® reduce downtime and accelerate mean time to diagnose (MTTD) and resolve issues.

New BMC AMI Ops quick-view dashboards for IBM^® z/OS^®, IBM^® CICS^®, Db2^®, and Java help users easily visualize key performance metrics for mainframe systems and subsystems, providing at-a-glance insights to help identify areas that could affect uptime or performance.

Finally, BMC now offers clients mainframe penetration testing (pentesting) through NetSPI to determine system vulnerabilities, validate security posture, and easily fulfil compliance requirements.

This quarter’s release coincides with the 60th anniversary of the release of the IBM^® System/360 machine on April 7, 1964. Over the past 60 years, the mainframe has undergone incredible change, not only in hardware capacity but also in its role as the backbone of the modern digital economy. As we enter the next 60 years of mainframe history, BMC is committed to continually offering new products and features that improve the speed, efficiency, and quality of your mainframe data management, development, operations, and security teams. We look forward to being your partner in 2024 and beyond as you optimize and transform the mainframe, taking the platform to new heights.

Learn more about our April release of BMC AMI enhancements on the What’s New in Mainframe Solutions page.

The mainframe has a long history of female trailblazers, with a legacy that continues through to today. Several women played a crucial role in the development of COBOL. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s championing of a computer language based on English words led to the creation of the FLOW-MATIC language, leading to her service as a technical consultant to the committee that defined COBOL in 1959. The sub-committee which created most of the new language’s specifications included both Gertrude Tierney of IBM and Jean E. Sammet of Sylvania.

At BMC, we’re proud of our history of continuous innovation. Women’s History Month presents a great opportunity to reflect on the women who have carried on the legacy of Grace Hopper, Gertrude Tierney, Jean Sammet, and others by receiving patents for the innovations they contributed to BMC’s solutions.

Being recognized for unique and groundbreaking contributions is quite an honor and a source of pride for the rest of one’s career. Senior Product Manager Irene Ford received patents in 2007 and 2010 for solutions that enable customers to mask sensitive data without writing custom programs. Reflecting on the experience, Irene says, “As I look back on this today, I am proud to have been able to work so closely with our amazing development team not only on these patents but also on the work we do every day to make our tools better for our customers.”

Fifteen women have been granted patents for their mainframe innovations at BMC:

Linda S. Ball (2001, 2006 & 2010)
Carla C. Birk (1997 & 2001)
Donna M. Di Carlo (2012)
Catherine Drummond (2022, 2023 & 2024)
Linda C. Elliott (2000)
Irene Ford (2007 & 2010)
Carol Harper (1988, 1989 & 1992)
Roxanne Kallman (2020, 2022 & 2023)
Karen Nelson-Katt (1998)
Lisa S. Keeler (2000)
Annette B. McCall (1995)
Pradnya Shah (2002)
Melody Vos (2005, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2015)
Lori Walbeck (2020 & 2021)
Wenjie Zhu (2022, 2023 & 2024)

I’d also like to take this opportunity to recognize our colleagues from other business units who have received patents:

Tamar Admon (2013)
Kalpa Ashhar (2016 & 2018)
Maribeth Carpenter (2023)
Jiani Chen (2015, 2017, 2019 & 2020)
Gwendolyn Curlee (2023)
Kanika Dhyani (2015, 2016, 2020 & 2023)
Priyanka Jain (2020)
Nitsan Daniel Lavie (2019, 2020 & 2024)
Donna S. Lowe-Cleveland (2005)
Pallavi Phadke (2018 & 2019)
Soumee Phatak (2020)
Carol Rathrock (1998)
Komal K. Shah (2014)
Annie Shum (2008)
Jeyashree Sivasubramanian (2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 & 2023)
Cynthia L. Sturgeon (2006, 2014, 2017 & 2018)
Priya Saurabh Talwalkar (2023)
Elaine Tang (2022)

Patent filings for Michal Barak, Komal Padmawar, Jennifer Glenski, and Priya Talwalkar are currently pending.

At BMC, we’re proud of our history of innovation and of the role that our female employees have played in making that innovation possible. We look forward to continuing to create solutions that serve our customers and move the industry forward with contributions from both current employees and future generations.

The mainframe is busier than ever, thanks to digital business growth and increased integration with hybrid and cloud platforms. But with growing workloads come increased volumes of data. Using tape-based or virtual tape systems (VTS) to back up this data can prove complex, time-consuming, and costly. By utilizing cloud-based storage, organizations can save money, increase security, and gain valuable insights into their data.

With today’s announced agreement to acquire Model9, BMC Software will add a robust, modern data management solution to a BMC AMI portfolio that already enables faster innovation, stronger security, better performance, and increased resilience.

Model9 solutions provide a number of benefits including a cost-effective alternative to tape and VTS backup systems with public, private, or hybrid cloud storage. By bringing the power of object storage to the mainframe, Model9 storage solutions eliminate the need for costly data center space dedicated to data backup, align the platform with enterprise cloud-first strategies, and offer simplified backup architecture.

Cloud-based storage also protects organizations from the threat of ransomware and other cyberattacks, providing highly secure, off-platform backups of mainframe data that can be quickly accessed and recovered at any location without reliance on mainframe hardware where the backup data is stored.

Beyond benefits to backup and disaster recovery plans, Model9 solutions add value to mainframe data by transforming it into open formats that can be accessed by a variety of non-mainframe applications and by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) analytics applications to unlock business intelligence.

Together, BMC AMI and Model9 solutions will comprise a powerful suite of solutions that enable hybrid IT from the mainframe to the cloud, empowering organizations to reimagine mainframe data management, optimize backup and recovery costs, protect against cyber threats, and gain valuable insights from their data.

Read today’s press release to learn more about the benefits of BMC’s forthcoming acquisition of Model9.

Data drives the world economy, and organizations of all sizes depend on the power of the mainframe and its readiness as the backbone of data management. A recent Dimensional Research survey, sponsored by BMC, shows that 9 out of 10 enterprises are running business-critical applications on the mainframe. With backend support of web and mobile applications on the rise, nearly two-thirds say that their organization’s use of the mainframe is increasing due to the rising needs around new applications and an increase in transaction volume.

This surge of mainframe use is accompanied by a transformation in the way data is used on the mainframe. The survey shows that for many companies, as data volume grows, so does the complexity of the data stored. The mainframe is evolving into a smarter computing platform, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to rapidly move data and business intelligence in real-time.

It was also found that 98 percent of mainframe professionals believe improvements to Db2^® databases are needed, with improved performance and availability, faster disaster recovery, automation of common tasks, and simplified administration among their top concerns. It is timely that IBM has announced not only a next-generation mainframe, IBM^® z16™, but also a new release, IBM Db2 13 for z/OS. At the same time, BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and BMC AMI DevX announce that our entire mainframe portfolio is generally available to support IBM z16 and Db2 13 for z/OS.

When You Are Ready to Migrate to Db2 13 for z/OS – BMC Is There

Our mainframe research shows that 92 percent of respondents see the mainframe as a platform for long-term growth and are prioritizing the implementation of AI and ML. BMC is committed to expanding the use of AI and ML in the BMC AMI portfolio. Over the past year, BMC has worked with IBM to ensure that whether you upgrade to Db2 13 for z/OS  immediately or in the future, you can count on the features and reliability of BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX solutions to meet your needs.

Performance Optimization

BMC AMI Data for Db2^® keeps data optimized with no downtime, enabling you to control database maintenance through a centralized, common interface. Intelligent automation improves application performance and enables the performance of reorganizations while utilizing fewer resources.

Faster Recoveries with No Loss of Integrity

Automated backup and recovery tasks allow the quick creation of complete, data-consistent backups with no downtime. Online data migration enables database administrators to back out of database changes, recover forward from a point-in-time copy, or recover into a new table space.

Simplified Database Administration

BMC AMI Data for Db2^® simplifies database administration with the automation of common tasks, mitigates and reduces risk with version control and pre-production testing, and enables faster duplication of data with fewer resource demands.

Intelligent Data Management

With a centralized, intelligent architecture, designed to handle the complex problems facing IT today, BMC solutions help keep databases and applications fully available throughout backup, unload, and reorganization, while maintaining data integrity for structured and unstructured data. By leveraging intelligent automation, BMC AMI Data for Db2^® also reduces the time and cost of daily database housekeeping operations.

Anticipate SQL Slowdowns

BMC AMI Data for Db2^® reduces CPU consumption and increases application efficiency by pinpointing resource-intense SQL without the need to run expensive SQL traces. The ability to anticipate SQL-related slowdowns and diagnose and track performance problems to their source enables faster issue resolution and greater availability.

Test Data Management

Offering developers and database administrators an efficient way to manage Db2 test environments, BMC AMi DevX test data management solutions help organizations advance their digital transformations. BMC AMI DevX File-AID enables users to create and populate test tables that accurately reflect production relationships using a relevant subset of data, without the need to code SQL or write independent programs.

Mainframe Developer Productivity

BMC AMI DevX application development solutions increase developer efficiency by enabling easier issue diagnosis and debugging. BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID helps developers quickly resolve defects by providing valuable information on the abending program’s last Db2 calls, while BMC AMI DevX Code Debug enables developers to debug Db2 stored procedures while also providing debugging assistance for programs that use Db2.

Application Performance Measurement

BMC AMI Strobe enables users to measure and evaluate application performance by identifying the database request modules (DBRMs) and SQL statements that are most active within your Db2 system, so you can detect opportunities to improve efficiency.

Partnering for the Future

As the new IBM z16 and Db2 13 for z/OS enable faster, more powerful data management, BMC stands ready as your partner in digital transformation. BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX solutions help to make your transition seamless, whether you plan to migrate to the next-generation mainframe and latest Db2 release today or further down the road.

Make change your advantage. Download this eBook and learn how to combine “Dev + DBA + Ops” together for a unified, automated database solution.

In the modern digital economy, organizations are under pressure to continually innovate, delivering more features and new applications faster than ever before. As proven by the increased consumer reliance on digital services due to the pandemic, the ability to adapt to changing market needs and provide value which excites customers has never been more critical.

Organizations that rely on the transactional power and database capabilities of the mainframe need innovation on the platform to keep pace with other areas of the IT ecosystem. This requires breaking down siloes and erasing the lines between your mainframe and the rest of your IT ecosystem—in short, treating the mainframe as just another piece of the IT puzzle.

The combined power of the BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX portfolios offers a holistic approach to mainframe modernization with products that work together to give you full control over development, operations, security, and data, promoting an open-borders mentality of multi-vendor, multi-platform toolchains and a simplified, cross-platform IT environment.

Innovation at the Speed of Now: A Mainframe-Inclusive DevOps Toolchain

Adoption of DevOps and Agile practices improves the quality, velocity, and efficiency of your software development and delivery, giving you the ability to react to changing marketplace dynamics and move your business forward. This requires not only a cultural shift toward a mindset of continuous improvement, but the use of the modern tools that help to increase productivity and provide a greater understanding of how changes affect each piece of the IT ecosystem.

We’ve strengthened BMC’s DevOps solutions with the integration of BMC AMI DevX application development tools, covering software development and delivery at each stage of the process, from code visualization, to testing, to build and deploy. These tools empower organizations to develop an enterprise DevOps toolchain that’s completely inclusive of the mainframe environment, addressing application changes not only from a coding and development perspective, but also taking into consideration how those changes impact data and operational workflows.

With these tools, developers of any skill level can be extremely productive, working with familiar development environments and integrating them seamlessly with the solutions that the mainframe requires. This familiarity will also help attract new talent by shortening the learning curve and offering developers the ability to become productive immediately.

A New Outlook on Resilience

Business resilience is often viewed as a combination of availability and performance, but its scope must be broadened. In the digital age, business resilience includes being prepared for inevitable change with the ability to adapt and respond rapidly to market disruptions while maintaining business continuity. Your business must be able not only to withstand, but to make change, creating new customer experiences while delivering constant uptime and operating at peak efficiency so you can be the disruptor rather than the disrupted.

BMC’s mainframe solutions empower you to achieve this modern definition of resilience while maintaining a competitive level of innovation. BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) solutions employ predictive intelligence, automated probable cause analysis, and prescribed remediation to maximize availability, while our BMC AMI DevX tools support a “shift left” approach in testing.

For example, BMC AMI Recovery solutions help ensure that your business data is always recoverable, so your applications are always running, and your business is always available to serve your customers’ needs. Meanwhile, BMC AMI DevX Data Studio enables easy comparison, masking, and provisioning of this data for testing of new applications.

The integration of automated testing throughout the DevOps lifecycle does more than eliminate bugs.  Testing early and often lets developers know immediately where issues may lie, improving code quality and developer efficiency. Reusable test assets and intelligent automated test execution further free up developers’ valuable time and ensure test consistency and relevance. And integrating comprehensive unit, function, integration, regression, and performance testing with tools like Git, SonarQube, and Jenkins enables the creation of fully automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery workflows.

The synergy of BMC’s mainframe portfolios results in lower failure rates, higher-quality software, and faster problem detection and resolution when disruptions do occur.

Better Together

With this combined portfolio, BMC has strengthened its ability to provide value as a strategic partner in your digital transformation. And as you adapt and innovate, we’ll do the same, building upon our legacy of innovation with new features, integrations, and enhancements that not only improve your mainframe environment today, but help you to prepare for and respond to the changing landscape of the future.

When the mainframe was introduced some 50 years ago, it revolutionized the world, ushering in the rise of new technologies and industries alike. While IBM developers may not have dreamed the platform would enjoy such a lengthy product lifecycle (remember Y2K?), the fact is that mainframes continue to power some of our largest and most critical private and public sector organizations today—even as migration to the cloud continues to accelerate.

In fact, for many large organizations the mainframe is the cornerstone of their Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE), allowing them to differentiate their goods and services in the marketplace by bringing both extensive computing power and intelligent technologies to the task.  When mainframe systems are optimized, organizations can achieve the agility, customer centricity and actionable insights today’s digital-first businesses and consumers demand.

Consider, for example, that some of the world’s largest hotel chains deploy reservation systems that are web-based for the consumer—and driven by mainframe technology on the back end.

Financial institutions everywhere are adding new capabilities in areas like fraud detection as well with the mainframe at their core. And major logistics companies both design their delivery routes and make them accessible to drivers in real time using AI and mainframe systems.

According to Forrester, 57 percent of enterprises with a mainframe “currently run more than half of their business-critical applications on the platform. Seventy-two percent of customer-facing applications are completely or very dependent on mainframe processing.”

Mainframe technology is clearly delivering all the availability, reliability, performance, scalability, and security required to run today’s applications and to make the platform an invaluable IT component for organizations in the future.

It’s time to move it out of the shadows of data processing and transaction management—and into the foreground of business innovation.

The Modern Mainframe

Mainframe technology continues to advance, and companies are increasingly recognizing the value of these time-tested systems. 2020 BMC research reveals that a full 90 percent of respondents believe in the “combined long-term and new workload strength of the platform, the highest level of confidence seen in six years.” And MIPS continue to increase.

Unlike mainframes of the past, IBM’s z15—its current model introduced in 2019—looks like any other on-premise server in your environment. Modern software tools are available for the mainframe as well, and they work just like the tools you may be using to manage applications in the Amazon cloud.

For example, you can leverage AI and automation to manage and optimize mainframe systems, making them operate more effectively with less effort and at a lower cost. Where the mainframe really shines, though, is in its ability to be secured using the industry’s most advanced intelligent technologies.

CISOs and enterprise security analysts believe every system should be secured and visible to the Security Operations Center however they can lack awareness of the vulnerabilities of their mainframe systems. Mainframe operations teams often believe in the native security of the mainframe and can lack awareness of the vulnerabilities facing mainframes. In reality the average mainframe has more than 100 severe vulnerabilities and can be compromised in as little as 6 minutes. While the mainframe is securable, the skills to effectively secure it are in short supply.

Tools like BMC AMI for Security add an extra layer of protection by enabling enterprise security information and event management (SIEM) systems to also monitor mainframe environments in real time. For instance, BMC AMI lets you secure your mainframe like any other system, removes the need for specialized mainframe expertise, and lets you extend your existing security investments and expertise to protect a critical piece of your infrastructure that is vulnerable to insider threats, social-engineering attacks, credential theft, and 0-day vulnerabilities

Optimizing the Mainframe

According to Gartner, “Application modernization is not one ‘thing.’ If you’re faced with a legacy challenge, the best approach depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. Replacement isn’t the only option.”

To truly optimize your mainframe systems, they must be viewed as strategic assets—and worthy of an investment in time and technology. Monitoring and management solutions such as BMC’s Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) suite can transform the mainframe from a back-office workhorse to an agile, cost-effective platform for launching new applications, features, and services.

In developing BMC AMI solutions, we tapped decades of expertise and innovation from across the industry and consulted with leading data scientists as well. The result is a suite of tools that leverages AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to achieve a self-managing mainframe.

BMC AMI is an end-to-end solution that is easy to implement. With BMC AMI, multivariate analysis is applied simultaneously across multiple data sources to track anomalies. Predictive analytics are driven by pattern analysis algorithms that detect anomalies and analyze their impact. BMC AMI also employs intelligent automation to keep the environment running securely and optimally, and built-in domain expertise that automatically tracks KPIs.

In essence, BMC AMI is part doctor, part security professional, part librarian/data scientist, and part financial advisor. Working together, BMC AMI solutions ensure the health, performance, security, and availability of mainframe systems, applications, and data while also ensuring easy data access for those—and only those—who are authorized. BMC AMI also continuously monitors metrics to help you reach your business goals and objectives while uncovering the insights you need to maximize your investments going forward.

Cultivating a New Generation of Mainframe Experts

Even as new, advanced software solutions are modernizing the mainframe, many organizations are not yet leveraging them to their full potential, often because their ITOps personnel are inexperienced on the platform.

In truth, when the right technological investments are made, organizations will find that they do not need as many—or as skilled—mainframe operators to keep the environments running well. Consider also that COBOL is a relatively easy programming language to learn. And with BMC’s powerful and integrated DevOps tools in place, COBOL becomes just another language that your capable application developers can quickly master.

BMC also offers training and mentoring programs to help bring clients up to speed on modern mainframe technologies. We have seen many customers successfully run mainframe training programs as well by leveraging IBM’s Z Academic Initiative.

Ultimately, with the right skills, tools, and mindset, your mainframe systems can become more than full participants in your Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). They can lead the way.  And you may just find that it is easier – and more efficient – to develop new applications on the mainframe than on any of your other valued hardware assets.

When it comes to digital experiences, modern consumers are impatient. The likes of Apple and Amazon have taught them well that they can get exactly what they want in the digital realm, immediately, via their channel of choice.

While businesses are looking for ways to meet these expectations by expediting the delivery of new applications, features and services, accelerating the development process can lead to quality issues and poor customer experiences. Consider also that new technologies are continuously introduced into your environment, making it increasingly complex. Service ticket volumes are proliferating as IoT devices, APIs, mobile applications, and both digital and machine users access systems.

This onslaught of new technologies and users is yielding vast amounts of data as well, which only complicates the challenges faced by IT operations teams. As noted by Gartner, “IT operations is challenged by the rapid growth in data volumes generated by IT infrastructure and applications that must be captured, analyzed, and acted on.”

While traditional monitoring and management tools may have worked well in the past, given the complexity of today’s hybrid cloud environments, IT managers no longer have the time or bandwidth to sift through volumes of alerts to discern whether the issues they are flagging are real or not.

So how can your IT operations team continue to evolve applications and services across the environment, meeting customer expectations, maintaining performance and availability, and ensuring that strategic initiatives are supported?

AIOps Drives Innovation

An investment in AIOps can help you successfully advance your infrastructure by providing your team with the tools they need to both filter out event noise and take a more accurate and predictive approach to management and monitoring.

Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, AIOps solutions allow you to identify or predict potential problems before they impact business services, help with root cause analysis and then prescribe corrective actions.

AIOps tools help simplify and streamline IT operations by building models that can examine, for example, a given set of minutes on a Tuesday and compare that to a model of what historically are normal conditions for that same time period. Based on this data, AIOps tools can pinpoint anomalies and raise alerts accordingly. When overall conditions change, AIOps models can also be retrained as well.

Because AIOps solutions automate monitoring and management processes, they elevate the role of ITOps teams, allowing them to spend less time troubleshooting and more time collaborating with business units to advance their strategies and put innovation to work.

Achieving Velocity

ITOps teams remain focused on the user experience. More than any aspect of the digital experience, consumers value velocity—the speed at which the new technologies they need are developed and available to them.

However, just deploying new features, services, and applications for users is not enough. When a new application is launched, you need to ensure a quality experience for users—and slow response times are more than just an aggravation. They have real business impacts. In fact, a recent Google study cited by Forbes found that “53 percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.”

And if your system or application goes down for users, the costs can be staggering. According to the IT Intelligence Consulting 2019 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey, “98 percent of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs more than $100K; 86 percent report that number to be more than $300K; and 34 percent say it can cost anywhere between $1M and $5M.”

Proactively diagnosing issues is critical to elevating user experiences—especially in agile software development—and can prevent the financial bleeding that application downtime ultimately yields.

AIOps can help you meet the demand for velocity and quality. The intelligence embedded in AIOps makes future capacity planning much easier and more precise for IT operations teams. This is because the solutions can enable you to correlate analyses between business drivers and resource utilization metrics, information you can use to allocate and schedule the resources needed to support new applications.

AIOps and the Mainframe

The market for mainframe technology continues to grow according to MarketWatch, at 2.6 percent annually, suggesting that these highly secure supercomputers are as relevant today as they were decades ago.

Like many large organizations, your environment may be anchored by mainframes. However, managing the mainframe has never been more complex—in part because many organizations have failed to modernize the software tools they need to optimize the platform—and also because older generations of workers are retiring, which can mean a loss of mainframe expertise within the ITOps team.

AIOps solutions help fill in the skills gap. By modernizing and automating critical monitoring and management processes, AIOps tools allow your ITOps personnel to quickly apply their existing skills to this unfamiliar platform, detecting issues before they escalate while delivering the performance levels customers demand.

BMC’s Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) Solutions

According to IDC, by 2021 70 percent of CIOs will aggressively apply AIOps to “cut costs, improve IT agility, and accelerate innovation.” Here’s why you should invest in BMC AMI solutions for your mainframe assets as you embark on this journey:

A self-managed mainframe isn’t achieved through a patchwork of disparate solutions. Instead it requires an end-to-end solution that fosters integration across the infrastructure and delivers a seamless user experience that sets the stage for business growth and technological innovation.

BMC’s AMI suite of products delivers on AIOps’ promise by:

• Applying multivariate analysis simultaneously across multiple data sources to track anomalies
• Employing predictive analytics driven by pattern analysis algorithms that detect anomalies and assess their impact
• Using intelligent automation to keep the environment running securely and at peak efficiency
• Offering built-in domain expertise so users can track the right KPIs without necessarily relying on in-house technical skills that might be scarce

Let us help you optimize all your resources, from the mainframe to the cloud. Click here to learn more about BMC AMI Operational Insight.

Unfortunately, cybercriminals are always working to find the vulnerabilities in business systems. And in many instances, they succeed.

As reported earlier this year, a leading global hotel chain suffered a data breach, impacting 5.2 million customers and exposed their names, genders, phone numbers, travel information, and loyalty program data. Another massive data breach occurred in May 2020 at a U.K.-based jet airline company, resulting in the loss of personal information for more than 9 million customers.

Security Intelligence reports that the average cost of a data breach in 2019 was $3.92 million.  And if you have ever gone through one yourself as an IT security professional, you know just how much valuable time is lost responding to a breach.

Consider also that the tactics—and tools—of cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated by the day. As noted by Forbes, cybercriminals are “integrating AI and machine learning into their malware programs to bypass and infiltrate targeted systems.”

With the methods of cybercriminals constantly changing, it is essential to continuously assess and expand your cybersecurity strategy to ensure that no system—no matter how obscure or “safe” it is believed to be—can be compromised. Every point of weakness needs to be considered in your strategy to prevent a potential breach.

So, how can your security team protect systems, applications, and data in this brave new world of cybercrime, pinpointing vulnerabilities in your systems, bringing indicators of compromise to the surface and taking proactive actions to prevent attacks?

Adopting a Zero Trust Strategy

Ultimately, protecting your environment today requires a holistic approach to cybersecurity. A Zero Trust strategy is recommended, one based on the premise that everything needs to be considered unsecured until proven trusted and secured.

Securing systems, applications and data also requires the right tools. Fortunately, a new generation of adaptive cybersecurity solutions is fast advancing, leveraging AI and machine learning technologies to uncover hidden threats to your environment in real time, wherever they may occur.

How Adaptive Cybersecurity Works

Adaptive cybersecurity tools are designed to evolve as they automatically protect, detect, and respond to suspicious events like privilege escalations, unusual access requests, and threats from within and outside your environment. Among their many benefits is the ability to integrate security technologies across the infrastructure, breaking down technological silos and elevating visibility for all.

Because adaptive cybersecurity tools apply AI to the continuous monitoring of systems, applications, and user behaviors, they allow security teams to reliably detect threats well before they surface and advance through internal systems. AI is especially valuable for establishing the broader, more inclusive visibility needed today to ensure every system is monitored and secured.

Even as data proliferates across your hybrid cloud environment, it remains important to remember that your organization’s most sensitive data resides on your mainframes.

While CISOs and enterprise security analysts strive to ensure that every system is secured and visible to the Security Operations Center (SOC), they often lack awareness of the vulnerabilities within their mainframe systems.

The reality is 0-day threats, configuration weaknesses, and modern threats like ransomware are all present risks to sensitive mainframe data. Relying on the native security of the mainframe can leave this data vulnerable to attacks.

Securing the Mainframe with BMC AMI Security

BMC AMI Security equips you well for the fight against cybercrime by becoming a virtual, always-on security expert for the mainframe. Built on the guidance and expertise of the industry’s most recognized mainframe security experts, BMC AMI Security allows you to quickly bring threat events, vulnerabilities, and potentially malicious actors to the attention of your SOC experts.

BMC AMI Security delivers on the promise of adaptive cybersecurity by:

• Automating responses to mainframe security events
• Ensuring that real-time visibility of threats and suspicious behaviors on your mainframe are integrated with your enterprise SIEM
• Consistently updating and delivering one of the industry’s broadest set of mainframe indicators of compromise
• Providing out-of-the-box policies that automatically harden the mainframe and reduce your attack surface
• Translating security events into common language, enabling security analysts to respond to incidents on the mainframe regardless of their level of mainframe expertise

In addition to securing mainframe systems, BMC AMI Security helps you remain in compliance with the growing list of global regulations, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, FISMA, GDPR, ISO 27001, IRS Pub. 1075, NERC, and many others.

BMC AMI Security is also supported by BMC Mainframe Services from RSM Partners, a service organization of highly experienced IT professionals offering on-demand expertise to determine the current health of your mainframe security, uncover vulnerabilities attackers may exploit, and deliver a plan to remediate them. This support resource is particularly valuable to organizations experiencing a shortage of skilled mainframe managers.

Adaptive Cybersecurity and ROI

The need to invest in new, modern cybersecurity tools will only increase as your infrastructure advances and becomes more complex. To get C-suite buy-in for the investments you need to make, you must build a business case for them.

As noted by Business Times, it is difficult to “measure the return on investment in cybersecurity solutions, because success is demonstrated through the absence of something rather than the generation of business income.”

Ultimately, an investment in BMC AMI Security delivers value by helping your organization achieve the following:

• Implement an inclusive strategy that enables more insight, greater context, and confidence that data, applications, and systems are secure across the entire hybrid environment
• Integrate mainframe security with enterprise security solutions extending the value of your current investments in security staff and software
• Help ensure the most securable platform you own is free from software, hardware and configuration vulnerabilities

Data breaches are not going away and any one potential point of failure is a win for an attacker. The tools and strategies you put in place today will directly impact your ability to protect data, systems, and applications down the road.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “the customer is king”.  Now more than ever, this applies to innovation-minded enterprises wanting to keep up with customer demand.  According to a recent Salesforce Research study, 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations and 56% of customers actively seek to buy from the most innovative companies. An integrated DevOps toolchain allows innovation to shine through – providing a more intuitive customer experience from new apps and services developed, deployed and run on the mainframe.

This is why BMC’s recent acquisition of Compuware, the premier provider of solutions to scale agile and DevOps on the mainframe, has been so well received by industry analysts and customers alike.  Prework from a recent BMC Mainframe Executive Council showed that customers felt the acquisition was a “Good move.” and are “looking forward to [future] product integration.”

1+1 = 3

Early findings from our 15^th Annual BMC Mainframe survey show that 78% of respondents say it would be useful if they could update mainframe applications more frequently than they currently do.   90% of respondents also say they see the mainframe as a platform for combined long-term and new workload strength. Couple this with increasing digital demands – as with the mainframe handling billions of transactions daily – and the need to implement an integrated DevOps toolchain has become paramount.

The intrinsic value our customers will gain from BMC’s automated intelligence, security and data management solutions will augment Compuware’s developer tool set to ensure new apps and services delivered across the mainframe are done efficiency and with quality.  BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligent (AMI), along with Compuware’s portfolio, empower the modern mainframe developer experience (DX) to deliver a more compelling and intuitive customer experience (CX).

Customer Obsessed

Week 3 of BMC’s close of the Compuware acquisition and we’re working towards an integration strategy that’s driven by one very important commonality – we’re both customer-obsessed.

• Both of our organizations’ customer satisfaction ratings are best in class when compared to any industry – not just enterprise IT.
• July will ring in Compuware’s 22^nd successful quarterly release and BMC continues to deliver innovation – following suit with a more quarterly release cadence as well. A decision made based on customer feedback.
• BMC and Compuware both make it our mission to understand customer pain points and bottlenecks as if they were our own and are lockstep on their digital transformation journey and priorities.

Our customer obsession carries over to our consistent innovation strategy as well. Change doesn’t stop with success.  Sure, it’s important to stop and celebrate milestones, but then you keep moving on and driving forward for further innovation.

In a recent podcast, Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley stated, “Change is a necessary part of the future of the mainframe…” and goes on to advise enterprises not to fight this change.  A mindset I’m in complete agreeance with and organizations need to adopt to drive success in today’s digital era.

As a mainframe executive with nearly 40 years’ experience on the platform, I’ve seen a good amount of claims made touting customer value acceleration. New providers, solutions and techniques have rushed onto the market promising exponentially increased productivity – promises that often fall short of customer expectations.  What hasn’t fallen short is the track-record of innovation BMC continues to emulate – providing a transcendent customer experience.

BMC’s acquisition of Compuware offers best of breed mainframe development, delivery, performance and operational expertise to scale agile and the DevOps toolchain

As the economic impact of COVID-19 continues to unfold, business focus in every industry has shifted from growth to simply surviving. As we enter summer months in the western hemisphere, tourism has come to a screeching halt, the auto industry reported car sales were down 50% year-over-year in April, retail sales were down 16.4% from March to April in the US and the banking industry is facing less credit card usage overall with less swipes and ATM transactions.

Despite these economic impacts, when we again achieve stability, the digital enterprise will continue to advance rapidly. Over the next five to ten years, there will be even more changes across every industry sector as people, technologies, data, devices, and ever-expanding networks converge to transform every aspect of work and life.

BMC is proud to be leading the charge in the mainframe’s evolution to meet these new business demands with our Enterprise 2025 vision around the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) – a roadmap back for customers to rebuild, renew and strengthen their business.

What is an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE)?

Simply put, an ADE is an organization built to successfully navigate and succeed in the digital era through agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights. It is built on five technology-enabled tenets:

1. A transcendent customer experience is key when you’re only as good as your latest app release. Today’s most agile apps create a compelling user experience (UX) with outstanding design and connected microservices. For many of the most critical applications that includes microservices running on mainframes.
2. Automation everywhere is inter-woven throughout – providing predictive models for issue resolution, knowledge sharing, app development and deployment, and much more.
3. An enterprise DevOps approach is necessary to deliver differentiated customer experiences. Developers are users too and they need a compelling developer experience (DX) that enables them to jumpstart application development from mobile to mainframe.
4. A data driven approach with predictive models can help our customers gain insights and achieve a faster time to value from their technology investments in development, operations and security.
5. Adaptive cybersecurity protects the mainframe from vulnerabilities and risks, predicts attacks before they happen and informs Security & Operations how to harden the mainframe against future threats.

When our customers can bring all five of these pillars together, they’re truly an Autonomous Digital Enterprise with benefits ranging from faster time to market with apps and services, an environment that’s just as innovative as it is secure and experience greater cost efficiencies.

The ADE is not just a roadmap for our customers, it’s also BMC’s roadmap for the future. One of the areas where we’re driving innovation is in the enterprise DevOps tenet.

Compuware, a BMC company

BMCs acquisition of Compuware has officially closed as of June 1. It’s our largest and one of our most strategic acquisitions. Compuware brings to BMC its application development, delivery and performance solutions to scale agile and DevOps across the enterprise with an open borders approach and connected DevOps toolchain.

Businesses that implement an agile DevOps toolchain experience measurable benefits when developing and delivering apps and services across the mainframe.

• With a continuous improvement methodology, quality is increased throughout the process of building, analyzing, testing, deploying and managing apps and services.
• An agile DevOps toolchain increases volume and velocity in bringing apps that run on the mainframe to market quicker vs traditional waterfall development.
• Efficiencies are increased, development bottlenecks are avoided and measurable KPIs are met throughout this iterative development process.

A scalable, connected, and agile DevOps toolchain is key to BMCs ADE vision – mainstreaming the mainframe to meet digital demands.

Mainstreaming the Mainframe

The Compuware acquisition is allowing BMC to broaden our expertise to a different mainframe audience – expanding into and servicing the development community. Empowering the next generation of mainframe developers is important as the changing of the guard takes place with experienced mainframe staff continuing to retire, making room for the next generation of mainframe stewards.

Compuware’s Topaz suite, ISPW technology, and classic product portfolios offer support for automation and intelligent operations with agile development and delivery across the mainframe infrastructure and its applications. Now developers, regardless of experience, can excel when working with mainframe languages like COBOL, applications, data, and infrastructure while still having the operations monitoring they need.

Compuware also offers flexibility of an open-borders approach to enterprise DevOps with 40+ integrations with providers such CloudBees, Jenkins, XebiaLabs (now Digital.ai) and more. This collaborative mindset is key when we look to BMC’s solutions and expertise in the mainframe operations and performance space.

BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (BMC AMI)

Investing in organic innovation is how we enable BMC AMI to help our customers modernize their intelligent mainframe environments on their ADE journey. And while all of BMCs portfolio is encapsulated in the ADE strategy, BMC AMI transcends across all five of its tenets.

We personify BMC AMI in four areas:

1. She’s the doctor who diagnosis issues across your mainframe infrastructure. BMC AMI AIOps, uses machine learning for accurate anomaly detection with a unique blend of KPIs to predict future problems in the performance and health of the mainframe.
2. She’s the security professional who can proactively expose your mainframe vulnerabilities, pivots to action before its compromised and enables your security team to respond, adapt and reduce the attack surface. BMC AMI Security hardens your defense, predicts, evolves and closes the window of vulnerability and extends your security expertise to a critical piece of your mainframe infrastructure.
3. She’s the librarian and data scientist who keeps your data organized and always available to the right people so you can quickly gain new insights from one of your most important business assets – your information. BMC AMI Data Management solutions leverage automation and intelligence with fast and powerful data movement, migration and optimization capabilities that enable a new generation of Dev and Ops teams to collaborate and create with the most timely and accurate data available.
4. She’s the financial advisor who helps you make the right investments. BMC AMI Cost and Capacity Management solutions help balance usage with cost to increase availability, avoid bottlenecks, maintain cost efficiencies while keeping the business need in focus.

What the Compuware acquisition does is marry the self-analyzing, self-healing, and self-optimizing power of the BMC AMI suite of products – increasing mainframe availability, efficiency, and security – with the Compuware Topaz suite, to fully empower the next generation of developers to build, analyze, test, deploy, and manage apps and services across the platform at scale – continuing to modernize the mainframe as a viable platform for development. BMC AMI and Compuware’s portfolio blends strategy with innovation to empower our customer’s success on their journey to becoming an ADE.