It’s the beginning of 2023, time again for making New Year’s resolutions. The dawning of a new year presents an excellent opportunity to recommit yourself (and your organization) to self-improvement and to the achievement of goals that will carry you forward into 2024 and beyond.
At BMC, we believe that you have the opportunity to make change your advantage. The use of digital services in almost all aspects of daily life has seen a sharp increase in recent years and continues to rise. Given the mainframe’s role as the backbone of the digital economy, this has led to increased transactional and data volumes, as well as market demands for new applications and services, developed and delivered as quickly as possible.
Not only is change a constant, it is occurring faster than ever before. Making this change your competitive advantage enables you to set yourself apart from slower-moving competitors, giving you the agility to react and adapt to future disruptions by offering your customers not only the services they demand, but the ones they need to adapt to this change, themselves.
But making change your advantage goes beyond satisfying and delighting your customers. The nature of mainframe work is changing, as well, with increased interaction with other platforms, new, modern tooling, and the adoption of DevOps, AIOps, DataOps, DevSecOps, and other practices on the platform. By creating a positive integrated experience for everyone touching the mainframe, you can enable greater innovation and faster time-to-market for new services and applications while optimizing your employees own user experience.
To this end, BMC’s January quarterly release of enhancements to the BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX portfolios continues our investment in a modern developer experience with increased automation of development tasks, greater insight into code testing, more productive database management, and improved reporting of security standard compliance.
Integrate and automate development
Automation provides developers’ more time to work on innovative solutions to market demands and enables faster, more frequent development and delivery of new applications and services. Leveraging new technology and opening the mainframe to greater integration will help you stay ahead of competitors that are slower to adapt.
In our January release, BMC continues our commitment to opening up capabilities via API with expanded mainframe application development integrations with Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions.
The new BMC AMI DevX Total Test extension for GitHub Actions enables developers to run continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) test workflows immediately after updating a piece of code, while the BMC AMI DevX Data Studio plugin for Jenkins ensures that developers are using the right data for automated tests.
Two new extensions for Microsoft Azure DevOps empower developers to easily download source code from BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline, automate code quality checks, and automate ISPW operations such as generate, promote, deploy, or regress for faster CI/CD pipeline setup.
These new extensions give developers the flexibility to speed delivery of mainframe innovations by leveraging their CI/CD platform of choice.
Increased visibility into testing
A new BMC AMI zAdviser dashboard aggregates testing activity from BMC AMI DevX Total Test and BMC AMI DevX Performance Test to give users a single-pane-of-glass understanding of their code testing activity. This new dashboard was designed to be used in conjunction with the DORA Metrics, Quality, and Benchmarks dashboards, empowering users to understand how code is being tested and with the high-level results of that testing.
Enhanced DBA user experience
A new user interface in BMC AMI Database Advisor for IMS™ increases productivity with more powerful automated actions, workflows, and scripts. And utilization of the HSTATS command within BMC AMI Command Center for Db2® improves SQL performance tuning and aids shift-left development by enabling DBAs and developers to easily migrate statistics between catalogs.
Evaluate adherence to security standards
Given the pace of innovation and increasing integration of the mainframe with other systems, ensuring the security of new applications and services is of utmost importance. In fact, results of the 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey show that, for the third year in a row, compliance and security are the top priorities for the platform. Providing security teams with easy-to-read, automated compliance standards and data reporting enables them to quickly uncover and address security gaps before they can be exploited by malicious actors.
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense, publishes Security Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIGs) that provide configuration standards for handling and managing security software and systems. Manually ensuring adherence to these guidelines can be difficult and time-consuming. It’s no surprise, then, that automated compliance reviews are offered for distributed systems. But what about the mainframe?
BMC AMI Security now offers out-of-the-box automated DISA-STIG reports. These reports provide further insight into the strength of mainframe security systems, helping to ensure adherence to these guidelines on mainframe systems, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
Make change your advantage in 2023
Making change your advantage in the new year means delivering intuitive and integrated self-service experiences for your organization’s mainframe professionals. With January’s release of enhancements, BMC renews its commitment to being your strategic partner as you implement changes that deliver outstanding results in 2023 and beyond.
For an in-depth look at all of the enhancements included in BMC’s January release, visit our What’s New page.
