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New integrations help IBM Z work 'in concert' with cloud teams

  
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A new path to resilient IT operations for mainframe and distributed teams?

A familiar foe

A Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report found that 89% of enterprises are using a multi-cloud strategy with technologies spanning across on-premises, cloud, and mainframe systems. This increasing complexity requires seamless collaboration across teams to avoid performance issues and security risks. But “seamless collaboration” is far from reality. It’s no secret silos between cloud and mainframe teams still exist for many IT organizations today. 

But why? If the problem were easy to solve through organizational structure, culture, and/or leadership initiatives, it would have been solved by now. The truth is, these silos run deep. Put simply, a better approach is required - one that embeds cross-org collaboration into the very fabric of everyday work. Unless our software tools, systems, and observability practices are integrated from the ground up - it’s unlikely we’ll achieve “seamless collaboration” any time soon. Enter IBM Concert.

A unified future

As announced, we’re excited to share that IBM Concert, IBM’s flagship SaaS solution for simplifying and optimizing application management and IT Operations with generative AI-driven insights – now supports select integrations with IBM Z. With these new integrations, hybrid SecOps teams can better understand and assess risk associated with application performance degradations, manage enterprise compliance more holistically, and accelerate change-related troubleshooting to become more resilient. As a result, IT Operators, SREs, and applications owners can ensure business services remain online with application-360 views of risk, resilience, and performance. IBM Concert leverages generative AI to decipher complex interdependencies and operational data then transforms that data into actionable insights to reduce silos and enhance operational efficiency.  

The key integrations between IBM Concert and IBM Z will help hybrid teams: 

  • Ensure infrastructure health: display holistic infrastructure health – inclusive of IBM Z – with scored performance assessments based on organizational requirements to ensure compliance and remain resilient.

  • Manage certificate health: Manage all enterprise certificates –inclusive of IBM Z – in a single view, automatically create tickets and trigger certificate renewal to minimize business disruptions and keep compliant. 

  • Accelerate change-related troubleshooting: generate software bill of materials (SBOMs) to assist in highlighting application build changes, track evidence of changes over time, and save time fixing configuration issues 

Let’s take a closer look at each category.

IBM Z Infrastructure insights

By pushing IBM Z performance metrics gleaned from sources like system processors, zIIP, z/OS, subsystem, storage, and application data into Concert’s ecosystem, SecOps leaders can see holistic infrastructure performance. With this valuable data, teams can manually assess risk and provide evidence on SLA or SLO requirements, use WatsonX to assess validity of evidence​, centrally track exceptions or deferrals​, automatically open tickets with pre-populated information, and more easily collaborate across traditional silos. When performance issues arise, an integration like this can help teams save time in war rooms and solve hybrid application problems more efficiently by streamlining efforts. As a result, organizations will become more resilient.

Infrastructure insights - screenshot - concert.png

IBM Z Certificate health 

For most organizations, managing digital certificates is a fragmented process. Mainframe teams might handle certificate updates differently than distributed teams, resulting in mismatches and errors that can lead to downtime or security vulnerabilities. By auto-discovering certificates originating on IBM Z, Concert users can continuously display certificate health – inclusive of IBM Z –so they can holistically evaluate compliance risk to business services and form a plan to mitigate certificate risks. Certificates approaching expiration can be centrally managed and auto-renewed to avoid business disruptions. This integration lifts the burden of certificate management from the Z team and keeps the whole organization audit-ready and compliant.

Visualize IBM Z Certificate health inside of IBM concert.png

IBM Z change-related troubleshooting

According to Gartner, “80% of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues, including poor change management practices…” In most organizations, changes can be made by dozens of engineers. When issues occur, the first question is almost always “what changed?” and finding the right person, the exact line of code, and resolving the issue can waste precious moments. With this integration, Application Owners can generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to view application changes that lead to problems/outages and accelerate troubleshooting to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). SBOMs can also help with future compliance by keeping a record of changes for audits as regulatory standards continue to be introduced. 

Accelerate change related troubleshooting with IBM Z SBOMs from IBM Concert

Better together

With these enhancements, Z and distributed teams can start to sing the same song. Our apologies for the concert dad joke, it was too good to pass up. By addressing these long-standing divides at the data layer, we can start to weave a single integrated web. One where Z and distributed teams can work harmoniously because they’re sharing the SAME data, and allowing AI-driven insights related to that data to suggest faster ways of solving complex problems. If your enterprise is looking to enhance application resilience, streamline operations, and reduce technology costs - IBM Concert is worth a look. 

IBM Concert is available through direct purchase from IBM, offering a variety of subscription options tailored to meet different organizational needs and scales. The IBM Z offerings associated with this new integrations are also available through direct purchase from IBM. Speak to your account representative to learn more. 

Try Concert for free today!