Guide Share Europe 2022 – my impressions part 3

This week, I want to conclude my impressions of the Guide Share Europe (#gseconf22 and #gseuk) conference, which took place at Whittlebury Manor on 1, 2, and 3 November. I’ll mainly focus on some more of the sessions that I attended. You can read my previous posts here and here.

On Thursday, I started the day with a swim in the pool at the hotel. It’s a very nice pool, and I even had time for five minutes in the jacuzzi. I did pop into the sauna, but didn’t stay very long. It was very hot! Then it was breakfast – listening to people saying how late they had stayed in the bar the previous night! Then it was on to the first session.

I hadn’t been to the CICS stream yet – there were so many good sessions at GSE – but I decided I had to see the always excellent Ezriel Gross give his presentation on “CICS resource definitions as part of a DevOps pipeline”. Ezriel is a Principal Solutions Advisor for Rocket Software. He started by showing the usual DevOps illustration of the stages in the DevOps process, and described how CICS tools could help. He said that CICS Configuration Manager was needed to: manage resource definitions on multiple repositories across diverse environments; make rapid and frequent updates to resource definitions to handle new business requirements; understand the impact of definition attributes on target environments; and identify duplicate, redundant, or inconsistent resource definitions. He went on to look at CICS administration problems and solutions. He discussed editing CICS System Definition (CSD) files and how CICS CM can help. He then demonstrated how to work with CSDs. The next issue that Ezriel looked at was delegating responsibility and how there are some things that application developers can do for themselves, and some that a junior CICS admin can do, and some only a senior CICS admin should do. The next problem that Ezriel looked at involved migrating changes between environments. Again, CICS CM can help. He followed that with a second demo. He looked at the changes across LPAR boundaries, and how to overcome those problems. He also described audit compliance problems and solutions, and problems with zFS support – and how to overcome them. Finally, he showed how all of these fitted in with the DevOps pipeline.

I finished the morning in the Storage stream watching a presentation entitled, “Ransomware recovery – It is more than just getting your data back”, given by MainTegrity’s Al Saurette. The main thrust of Al's presentation was that the focus for most sites is on recovering their data in the event of any problems with it – eg corruption or encryption. Al pointed out that a malicious attack on a mainframe will very likely include timebombs, multiple back doors, and other malicious attacks that occur long before the data is obviously attacked. So, restoring the data leaves these changes in the system, and makes it possible for the bad actors to get into the system again, re-encrypt the database, and you are back to recovering your data. What's needed is some way to determine which components have been affected, and be able to restore them to a trusted state before they were compromised. And to be able to do this quickly and surgically. Al went on to show how it was possible to implement automated prevention and restoration techniques that use browser-based tools to guide the recovery team through the required steps to recover. He looked at the importance of eliminating effort by integrating with immutable backups and existing security tools. Of course, in our ever-changing mainframe world, any software used needs to continuously stays up to date.

Unfortunately, I was called away and missed the afternoon sessions. In my calendar, I was hoping to go to “Using Ansible to accelerate your automation journey for CICS”, which was presented by Stewart Francis, a software engineer at IBM. He has spoken to the Virtual CICS user group, so I knew he would be good. And I was hoping to end the day of presentations with “How to start your CICS Modernisation journey”, presented by Phil Wakelin, a member of the CICS strategy and design team at IBM UK.

I thoroughly recommend the GSE conference. It’s very friendly, the presentations are excellent, it’s useful to talk to the vendors, and it’s great networking with old and new friends. However, if you did miss it, the good news is that there will be an online GSE conference in February on 7^th to 9th. At the moment the details are scarce, but more will be forthcoming soon. And being online, you don’t need to get your manager to pay for your travel and hotel accommodation etc. And people outside the UK and Europe can attend. So, see you there.