I have been reading about the data breach at Equifax and how it may have affected up to 143 million Americans. As of this writing, it appears that the breach happened due to a vulnerability in the Open Source Software, Apache Struts. A patch for the vulnerability was released back in

The IMS database is a very interesting database. In many environments, it just runs and runs and runs for years with little if any maintenance. I have heard it referred to as the “brick wall” of databases as you almost need to use a sledgehammer to bring it down. It is a wonderful pro

Case study: Two years ago, a clients’ senior DB2 DBA retired unexpectedly. The client had/has two junior DBA’s working under the senior DBA to support the environment. At some point between the senior DBA retiring and eighteen months ago, the client began experiencing two to three ove

One of the first questions we ask when we engage with a client is “Is the documentation of your environment current?” We are then given answers that range from “Yes, absolutely” to “I’m not sure” and “No it’s not.” Outside of “No”, we have found that more often than not the environmen

A few years back, a client requested our help in upgrading CICS on their mainframe. The client was in the public sector and their staff CICS Systems Programmer had been with the company for the last 15+ years. Their resource wanted to be involved in a couple of areas of the upgrade. O

Managing Full-time Project to Part-Time Maintenance New Iron Solutions started as a staff augmentation company in the fall of 2000. Over the years, we have found that there is a growing demand for mainframe staff augmentation and services, so we started focusing more and more of our e