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The following use cases are potential ways to use the cloud for non-production use cases. The key is to deliver “quickly” the infrastructure needed to perform a specific need or task. Waiting weeks for infrastructure delivery should be considered an “anti-pattern” since the cumulative time of waiting over the course of a project would be […]

As part of cloud and digital transformation initiatives, you may be taking a hard look at how to move your core business applications running on IBM Power Systems to the cloud. There are many reasons to migrate Power workloads to the cloud — improved flexibility and lower risk, cloud-native services that enhance core business applications, […]

Secure Remote Access Client Insert Text Feature  Ever since Skytap launched the Power offering, IBM i customers have been asking for a way to insert long strings of text into the IBM i guest OS. Many command-line statements in IBM i are very long and typing them into the client can be really time-consuming.   […]

The Skytap webhook service is a powerful feature, yet on first glance can be a bit intimidating. A webhook is a method used for one application to talk to another. In our case, the Skytap webhook service can send audit data and usage data to other applications. For example, suppose you want to be notified […]

One of the biggest challenges IBM i (and certain AIX) customers have to deal with is software licensing. The licensing model, adopted by many solutions based on IBM’s Power platform, is steeped in legacy.  You see, back in the day, independent software vendors (ISVs) needed to protect their software from copying and unlicensed use. Before the proliferation of the Internet, there were few effective ways to track software usage.  The most common method […]

Since 2017, IBM has used Skytap to support its Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and sales demo activity for Fast Start. Fast Start is IBM’s annual conference to showcase new product solutions and train its technical seller community and partner network.  This year was the first time IBM ran the event entirely online, which drew more than […]

Migrating to the cloud can be a daunting challenge for businesses worldwide that rely on IBM Power applications. The thought of re-platforming or re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud can be enough to stop a cloud initiative in its tracks. And many organizations that rely on business-critical apps running on IBM hardware have been challenged […]

Keeping up with updates and hotfixes from software vendors can be a challenge, even more so in traditional computing environments like IBM i. Skytap maintains an updated set of public templates for all the versions that are available to customers. At the time of this blog post, Skytap supports IBM i versions 7.2, 7.3, and […]

Skytap is pleased to announce that we are on track to achieving compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and ISO/IEC 27001:2013 in Q1 2021. IBM clients will be able to run IBM Power, x86, and hybrid application workloads while ensuring their data is secured to internationally recognized standards. Skytap on […]

Templates are a powerful concept within Skytap, allowing you to create a read-only instance of an environment, containing VMs, Networks, and settings, which can be instantly shared and deployed with others in your organization. Until recently, sharing templates with others outside your Skytap account required contacting Skytap support. But now you can share templates with […]

Skytap’s REST API is an important tool to help you automate some of the management tasks associated with running your application in the cloud. Until now, the security tokens you used for secure API access had an unlimited lifespan, and token expiration was a manual process. Skytap has just introduce an API token expiration policy […]

We developed Skytap on Azure to make it easy for organizations to run IBM Power, IBM i, AIX and x86 workloads in the cloud on Microsoft Azure. Last year we announced our availability on the Azure Marketplace, making it much easier for you to get started with Skytap.   Now all customers who purchase Skytap on […]