I always wanted to expand the role of ICE/IFO in our organization and involve other support teams but that was hard to do with its limited notification and report distribution capabilities. Problem solved! In the latest releases, these headaches are gone. I can now easily route Inspection Findings and Configuration Changes to anyone in the IT Management, IT Security, the Network team, and System Programming Teams. I can specify - Summary and/or Detail - Report Content, mix and match whatever the individual recipient may need. And what I really like is that each recipient gets only one email, with the content they want, the way they want it. So cool!
Our system audit reviews are done as part of our financial audit process. We have been written up several times for not having adequate documentation of system changes. We do a good job of documenting what we are going to do, but not what we actually do. ICE/IFO and ICE/SUBS filled this hole in our change management process by automatically building configuration baselines and then using them to detect and report changes. This really solved two problems for us. First, we’re off the Hot Seat; second, we now have an ongoing process that ensures a full backup of a viable configuration, for each running Image.
The thing we like best about the way NewEra is approaching the distribution of its ICE/Applications is that they allowed us to get started with minimal effort and expense, focusing on what was our most critical issue, LPAR integrity. As we get comfortable with ICE, we moved on to more global z/OS concerns: Sysplex and Subsystem Inspections, Baselines, Change Detection, Release Analysis, and File Integrity Management (FIM). We’re not certain we’ll ever need them, but our business is growing and that to us means more regulations and more oversight. It’s good to know that the tools we’ll need to solve these complex problems are already installed and available to our staff.”