Leading the UK’s IBM technology community

By Aileen Wynne, Women in STEM Chairperson It started with a chat.  Four of us, conversing at a vendor stand reminiscing about earlier GSE conferences.  We were discussing our first…

GSE UK members and guests will be fundraising for LimbPower, the national organisation that supports amputees, individuals with limb difference and their families, at our 2023 conference. The charity was…

Midland Freewheelers, part of the National Association of Blood Bikes, is one of our two chosen charities for the 2023 GSE UK conference. ‘Helping the NHS to help you’, this…

by Jamie Pease CISA, CISM, CDPSE, CISSP, CITP, MBCS, Chairman of the GSE UK Security Working Group The phrase ‘back to basics’ will resonate with some British people who were…

GSE UK Region’s three-day in-person conference from 1-3 November 2022 was bigger and better than ever: more learning, more discussing, more networking, and more socialising. “After such a challenging 2½…

by Mark Wilson, GSE UK Region Manager GUIDE Share Europe (GSE) was formed in 1994 when GUIDE (Guidance of Users of Integrated Data-Processing Equipment) and the European branch of SHARE…

Our first face-to-face Conference in three years, the 2022 GSE UK Conference taking place 1-3 November is expected to be the great success that we’ve come to expect from this…

Are we taking modern security on the modern mainframe seriously enough? I don’t think so. In part one of this blog, I explained how the mainframe was operating in silos…

We are now well into 2022, a useful time to reflect on the last year and what this year has in store for GSE UK and its members, writes James…

Blog from Jamie Pease: Are we taking modern security on the modern mainframe seriously enough? I don’t think so. A while ago, I asked a mainframe shop why their identity management solution was hooked up to the majority of their platforms - except for the mainframe. I was told, “Oh, we heard there were scalability and reliability issues.” This was pure hearsay: nobody could tell me the source.

Last time, I quoted Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, his ‘This is not a pipe’ painting and his comment that ‘Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves.’

In 1929, Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte painted ‘The Treachery of Images’ aka ‘This is not a pipe’. He said, ‘Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves.’ Pipes were ubiquitous then, as smartphones are today.

Impostor syndrome is what’s going on when despite being competent, you feel a bit of a fraud. Impostor Syndrome is very common – including among highly capable senior hot-shots.

While the path to digital transformation is often considered the most significant modernization initiative in the history of the mainframe, the growing yet opposing challenge being posed by a burgeoning skills gap is threatening to slow down or delay many projects.

I had a ‘latte’ of fun working with the Broadcom team to put together this year’s GSE UK keynote session, “Colleagues in Corvettes Getting Cappuccinos.” We invite you to “ride along” with us as we discuss mainframe topics ranging from security, DevOps, and AIOps, to becoming a new mainframer.

In the mainframe context, Security Operations is the uniting of two distinct teams: mainframe and security. In today’s cybersecurity landscape where every endpoint, including the mainframe, is a potential target, mainframe and security operations need to work together to be successful.

As enterprises look for ways to accelerate the delivery of new feature/function to stay ahead in a disrupt-or-be-disrupted world, cloud-native has become the standard for how clients develop, deploy, and manage innovative cloud services at the speed of business.

As this year’s conference is free to attend, we are asking all delegates to make a donation to our chosen charities, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and Guide Dogs for the Blind.