Outsourcing Resilience: Fortra Secures IBM Power Amid Skills Crisis

MINNEAPOLIS – October 13, 2026 – In the global economy, we often focus on the tangible assets that keep the modern world moving: the critical minerals mined for energy transitions, the shipping lanes that dictate global trade, and the energy grids powering our cities. Yet, there is a hidden, equally vital infrastructure that operates quietly in the background. It is the legacy computing backbone—specifically, IBM Power and IBM i systems—that processes the world's core banking transactions, orchestrates complex global logistics, and manages heavy manufacturing. Today, this foundational digital infrastructure faces a dual existential threat: the relentless surge of sophisticated ransomware and a severe, rapidly accelerating shortage of the specialized human capital required to maintain it.

Addressing this critical vulnerability, Power by Fortra, a global cybersecurity and software provider focused on the IBM Power market, has announced the launch of Continuity Care. Developed in partnership with enterprise data protection firm FalconStor Software, the new offering is a fully managed cyber resilience and recovery validation service designed specifically for IBM Power and IBM i organizations. By combining immutable offsite data retention with recurring, isolated recovery testing, the service aims to transform disaster recovery from a complex, in-house engineering challenge into an outsourced, turnkey utility.

The launch arrives at a pivotal moment. The technology industry is currently grappling with what insiders call the "RPG talent gap," referring to the programming language deeply associated with IBM i systems. As veteran administrators reach retirement age, critical infrastructure operators are facing severe headwinds in maintaining in-house disaster recovery expertise.

Bridging the Legacy Skills Chasm

For decades, the IBM i platform has been renowned for its unparalleled stability and reliability. However, that very stability has masked a growing demographic crisis within enterprise IT departments. Universities and modern coding bootcamps rarely teach the legacy skills required to manage these systems, leading to a shrinking pipeline of new talent.

"According to our definitive 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey, IBM i skills is the #1 concern among IBM i professionals, while 47% of respondents cited data recovery as a major issue, so this new joint offering with FalconStor addresses two of the top concerns in the market today," says Geoff Fischer, General Manager at Power by Fortra. The survey data reveals a stark reality: 69% of IBM i users now cite finding technologists with the necessary skills as their primary worry, a figure that has steadily climbed, surpassing even cybersecurity concerns.

This scarcity of talent has profound operational impacts. When specialized engineers are nearly impossible to recruit, smaller internal IT teams are forced to prioritize daily maintenance over strategic initiatives, compliance audits, and critical disaster recovery testing. Disaster recovery for IBM i is notoriously complex, involving unique single-level storage architectures and integrated databases that differ vastly from modern distributed systems.

One enterprise systems administrator at a major logistics firm noted that the burden on remaining staff has become unsustainable, making regular and comprehensive disaster recovery testing nearly impossible to execute internally. By offering Continuity Care as a fully managed service, Fortra is directly mitigating this acute shortage. The program allows enterprises to outsource the complex engineering required for recovery validation, ensuring that mission-critical backbones remain protected even as the workforce managing them undergoes a generational shift.

Beyond the Backup: Operationalizing Proof of Recovery

The second hidden current shaping this market is the evolution of cyber threats. In the modern ransomware era, traditional backup strategies frequently fail. Threat actors no longer simply encrypt production data; they actively seek out and corrupt secondary backup images before deploying their primary payloads. Consequently, merely having a backup is no longer sufficient. The new definitive compliance benchmark is verifiable, recurring proof of recoverability.

Continuity Care addresses this by shifting the enterprise focus from passive data storage to active, auditable resilience. The service is built upon two core technologies provided by FalconStor: Habanero and Cloud Clean Room.

Habanero facilitates the movement of IBM Power data to immutable storage on IBM Cloud Object Storage. Utilizing Write Once, Read Many policies, this ensures that a clean, unaltered copy of the organization's data is always available. Once written, the data cannot be altered, encrypted, or deleted by malicious actors for a specified retention period, neutralizing one of the primary tactics used in modern ransomware campaigns.

"FalconStor built Habanero and Cloud Clean Room to solve the recovery validation problem for IBM i and IBM Power environments, and Fortra is the right partner to bring that capability to market at scale," said Todd Brooks, CEO of FalconStor. "Their team already manages critical operations for thousands of IBM Power customers, and Continuity Care lets them extend that relationship to enable recovery with real proof behind it."

The Mechanics of Zero Trust and Immutability

While immutable storage guarantees data integrity, the actual process of restoring that data securely is where many enterprise disaster recovery plans falter. This is where the FalconStor Cloud Clean Room technology becomes critical.

Built on a patent-pending Zero Trust Secure Enclave, the Cloud Clean Room provides an isolated recovery environment hosted on IBM Power Virtual Server. In the cybersecurity realm, a "clean room" is a standard best practice—a quarantined digital space where recovered systems can be tested and verified without risking the re-infection of the primary corporate network.

The integration with IBM Power Virtual Server is a crucial technical differentiator. It ensures that the recovery environment is natively compatible with the specific architectural requirements of IBM i workloads. Every quarter, the managed service executes a full recovery validation test within this isolated enclave. The Zero Trust architecture mandates stringent authentication and continuous verification, assuming that no user or device is trusted by default.

This recurring testing generates detailed reporting that provides Chief Information Security Officers and compliance auditors with tangible proof that core systems can be brought back online in a clean, functional state. For organizations that are not yet ready for the full suite of services, the program is designed flexibly. Companies can begin with a streamlined entry option focused solely on offsite backup and validation, adding the full Cloud Clean Room recovery testing as their resilience requirements mature.

A Changing Enterprise Landscape

The introduction of Continuity Care highlights a broader structural shift in how enterprises manage risk and infrastructure. According to recent market analysis, a staggering 70% of organizations possess inadequate disaster recovery capabilities, with many relying on untested plans that breed a dangerous overconfidence.

Simultaneously, the Disaster Recovery as a Service market is expanding rapidly, driven by the financial imperatives of minimizing downtime. With the cost of enterprise downtime estimated at over $1,100 per hour for even basic systems—and exponentially higher for highly critical transaction backbones—the financial logic of outsourcing resilience is becoming undeniable. Furthermore, industry data indicates a massive surge in cloud infrastructure spending, heavily weighted toward managed service providers.

In this competitive landscape, Fortra and FalconStor are positioning themselves against incumbent legacy recovery providers and broader cloud disaster recovery vendors by emphasizing managed, verifiable recovery specific to the IBM ecosystem. While broader DRaaS providers offer generalized cloud recovery, the specialized nature of IBM i demands tailored replication and testing environments.

Ultimately, the true value of this partnership lies in its recognition of the underlying forces driving enterprise IT today. It is an acknowledgment that the most sophisticated technology is useless without the human capital to operate it, and that in an era of relentless cyber hostility, assuming your backups will work is a gamble no modern enterprise can afford to take. By turning recovery validation into a recurring, managed utility, organizations can secure the foundational digital resources that keep the global economy running.