At XYPRO we just celebrated Kick-off.  At this annual gathering of our entire XYPRO staff from around the world at HQ in Simi Valley, California, we review the events of 2015 and set the goals for 2016.  It’s also a time of internal education, process review & improvement, information gathering, employee feedback and overall company bonding.

At XYPRO we believe this exchange is a useful tool for everyone to understand “how we got there as a team”.  No one operates independently. Our success is a collective success, a result of collaboration and understanding one’s role in the overall process and taking responsibility for that role.

In my January Blog last year, I described how 2014 was a year of big changes.  A management buy-out and a restructuring of senior leadership positions.  Well 2015 ended up being even more exciting.  Full of changes, some challenges and many triumphs.

2015 meant a 23% growth in revenue over 2014, which had also been a record-breaking year.

In addition to financial and staffing growth, we also celebrated HPE choosing the XYGATE Data Protection (XDP), (powered by HPE Data Security’s SecureData) to be resold by the HPE NonStop salesforce.  This joint solution from HPE protects your sensitive data end-to-end throughout the enterprise. 

Earlier in the year, XYPRO successfully met HPE’s timeframes to have our suite of security and access control solutions tested and ready to be used on the exciting and new HPE NonStop X Hardware.  If that wasn’t enough, we also took delivery of our very own HPE Integrity NonStop X NS3 X1 – the first in North America!

2015 was also a year XYPRO invested heavily in R&D.  In fact, the commitment to new security solutions that meet modern, enterprise-wide and NonStop specific risk management needs was unprecedented in our company history.  XDP came from this commitment, as did the newest product to be born to the XYGATE Family:  XYGATE SecurityOne^TM (XS1), which was revealed at the NonStop Technical Bootcamp in San Jose this past November, receiving an incredible reception from the HPE Integrity NonStop User community.

XS1 and its patent-pending technology provides real-time Security Intelligence and Analytics for the HPE Integrity NonStop Server.  XS1 is designed to actively detect NonStop-specific indicators of compromise and alert on suspicious activity by gathering data from disparate sources that also include user behavior and use specialized security intelligence algorithms to correlate, contextualize and analyze events to paint a detailed security incident picture for the NonStop server in real time, significantly & meaningfully reducing Mean Time to Detection (MTTD).

Strong growth forecasts and product plans indicate the growth experienced in 2015 will continue for the HPE Integrity Nonstop server and XYPRO.  As we ride the momentum into 2016, we will continue working with and helping our customers with industry-leading solutions for their mission critical security needs.  We will continue to provide new and innovative ways for our customers to secure their systems and manage risk on the NonStop server in today’s security landscape.  Customer success is at the forefront of what we do.  Here’s to a great 2016 together!

 Preauthorization checks have grown popular in light of today’s alarming increase in fraudulent activities. The OmniPayments Preauthorization Engine is used by financial institutions in conjunction with the OmniPayments Financial Transaction Switch or as a seamless interface to other providers’ switches via a custom support module (CSM). Our customers call our Engine the fraud blocker. Via a complex set of rules, it preauthorizes transactions by identifying potentially deceptive transactions in real time and rejecting them without having to send the transactions to issuing banks for authorization. Modern and easy to manage, the OmniPayments fraud blocker preauthorizes millions of transactions far more effectively than its complex, compute-intensive competitors.  Sold separately or as part of the OmniPayments solution.

OmniPayments is a switching solution for the financial and retail industries. It is deployed on NonStop for the highest availability and offers all the requisite functionality to manage credit/debit-card transactions. It manages multiple devices, hosts application interfaces, and interoperates with third-party products or other systems if required. OmniPayments easily expands to provide additional functionality when needed and supplies complete security functions for every financial transaction handled, including encryption-at-rest and encryption-in-flight. Available around the clock, OmniPayments will survive any single fault, requires no downtime for maintenance or upgrades, and supports a range of disaster recovery solutions.

The OmniPayments pricing model for its standalone system is based on a one-time software license instead of on transaction volume.  OmniPayments guarantees that customers will save at least 50% off their current transaction processing costs.

OmniPayments also distributes OmniCloudX on NonStop X. OmniCloudX hosts numerous OmniPayments instances at a pay-for-use price so attractive that mid-size retailers and financial organizations now can enjoy the benefits of having their own high-capacity transaction switches. Starts at only $5000 USD per month. OmniCloudX is continuously available with automatic failover to other NonStop X systems. Like the OmniPayments standalone transaction switch, OmniCloudX provides complete security functions and is PCI-DSS compliant.

OmniPayments systems in production today process 700 million transactions per month, generated by point-of-sales terminals and over 14,000 ATMs. A single OmniPayments system supports up to 10,000 transactions per second. Multiple OmniPayments systems can cooperate to provide any capacity required by an application. From our seven worldwide locations, we serve as a 24×7 managed services provider for remote production monitoring.  Our team of 100-plus NonStop specialists are skilled at rapid project turnarounds, meeting deadlines, and enhancing OmniPayments to address a customer’s specific requirements.

OmniPayments, Inc. (www.omnipayments.com) is the product arm of Opsol Integrators Inc., a leading HP NonStop system integrator. For further information, contact Yash Kapadia at +1 408-446-9274 or at yash@omnipayments.com. 

Our presentation highlighted Shadowbase usage in various business continuity, data integration, and application integration solutions, and included a product update section describing all of the exciting new and enhanced features either recently released or that will soon be released. If you are interested in discussing this presentation’s content or would like us to present this or other HPE Shadowbase topics to your staff, please contact us.

To speak with us about your data replication and data integration needs, please visit us at www.ShadowbaseSoftware.com, email us at SBProductManagement@gravic.com, or call us at +1.610.647.6250.

Andre Cuenin
andre.cuenin@ir.com


 

 As we begin 2016, the need for security awareness and strong protection for HPE NonStop systems has never been greater, so there’s no better way to kick-off the new year than in Jaipur, India with a fantastic Business Critical Dialog 2016 conference.  Sometimes referred to as India NonStop Users Group (InNUG), BCD 2016 is actually a combined event for all Indian customers of HPE’s Mission Critical Servers (MCS) and had two conference tracks, HPE UX (HPUX) and HPE NonStop.  Over 150 customers attended BCD 2016 in person and many more participated virtually via live streaming.

 Randy Meyer (VP & GM of HPE MCS)        Sandeep Kapoor – Sr. Director & GM of HPE MCS APJ

XYPRO had two sessions on the schedule which covered NonStop security fundamentals and NonStop data security.  In the first session, Barry Forbes (VP, Sales and Marketing) presented on HPE NonStop Security and Compliance; he provided an overview of NonStop security and how HPE and XYPRO have partnered together to provide solutions that protect NonStop systems from internal and external security threats.  These include XYGATE products that are included in the latest HPE NonStop Security bundle, as well as other XYGATE products available from HPE.  Using PCI DSS as context, Barry discussed latest product enhancements, as well as typical deployment examples showing how these products can be implemented.

Data can be an organization’s most valuable treasure and it’s a major target for cyber-criminals; in my session, I discussed how HPE and XYPRO have partnered to deliver HPE’s enterprise data security solution specifically optimized for the NonStop platform.  HPE’s SecureData solution for Format-Preserving Encryption and Secure Stateless Tokenization is an industry-leader in protecting enterprise data and XYPRO has used its deep knowledge of the NonStop platform to develop XYGATE Data Protection (XDP) which enables the implementation of HPE SecureData with no changes to NonStop applications.  XDP also provides packaged capabilities which simplify the deployment of HPE SecureData to ensure scalability and performance, as well as tight integration with the NonStop security framework.  Together, XYPRO XDP and HPE SecureData are an integrated solution for protecting sensitive data, reducing the scope of regulatory compliance, and neutralizing the impact of a data breach.

XYPRO Technology Corporation

Cyber security experts have warned us for a long time that our critical infrastructures, including power grids, are susceptible to malicious hackers. A decade ago, the danger to infrastructures was not an issue; as there was no way for attackers to gain access to our industrial control systems. Back then, communication between control systems and the devices they managed took place via dedicated communication channels, e.g., landlines and microwave towers.

Today, control systems and devices are attached via the Internet, which provides much cheaper, much faster, and unfortunately much more open interconnectivity. This creates an ideal pathway for hackers to infiltrate systems and do damage.

Can a critical-infrastructure hack really take place? In its article “Can Hackers Take Down Our Power Grid,” the Availability Digest discussed a recent event that has proven the danger to be resoundingly real. In November/December 2015, thousands of Ukrainian homes lost power after the country’s electric grid was hacked. In the case of Ukraine as well as most other countries, power utilities still run on old designs, created long before cyber security was an issue. Now that control systems are more vulnerable, adding sufficient safety measures is of prime importance.

In addition to “Can Hackers Take Down Our Power Grid,” read the following articles in the Availability Digest’s January 2016 issue:

Protect Your Data Center from Flooding – If you are a datacenter manager, nothing can ruin your day faster than your data center falling victim to a flood. You may think that your data centers are safe in their current locations. However, rising sea levels due to climate change will overtake many data centers in the next several decades. In this article, we look at some real-life datacenter floods; and we suggest some actions that you may want to consider to protect your data center if it does become a flooding victim.

RBS – A Poster Child for Outages – The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its associated banks, NatWest and Ulster Bank, have suffered a half-dozen major outages in the last three-and-a-half years alone. Although RBS’ failure rate makes it stand out among other banking institutions, the RBS issues are not only its issues. Faced with aging legacy systems, lost or nonexistent documentation, and staff inexperienced with decades-old architecture, banks worldwide are struggling to manage modern IT services in maintenance-defying data centers.

The Cost of Data Breaches – Ponemon Institute recently released its tenth annual study on the cost of data breaches. Sponsored by IBM, the study examined breaches that occurred in 2014. 350 companies from eleven countries were included. The results in summary? The average cost of a data breach increased by 23% from 2013 to 2014, and the average cost per breached record increased by 12% in the same time period.

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - Our article highlights some of the numerous @availabilitydig tweets that were favorited and retweeted in recent days.

The Availability Digest offers one-day and multi-day seminars on High Availability: Concepts and Practices. Seminars are given both onsite and online and are tailored to an organization’s specific needs. We also offer technical and marketing writing services as well as consulting services.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 735 members and counting. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.
 

The “European NonStop HotSpot - Conference & Exhibition” is hosted by GTUG and Connect Germany for the sixth time. Encouraged by the great success of past conferences, we are going to organize a great event again.

This is your chance to meet your fellow NonStop users and to discuss your requirements with HP Executives onsite. In addition, you have the opportunity to get first-hand information and to learn about the latest strategic and technical developments on NonStop from users, HP and partners - now even more up-to-date!

…. enjoy the comfortable conference facilities at the Berlin Radisson Blu Hotel, with its spectacular Aquarium lobby. This year's venue is located in the former eastern part of Berlin, between the Berlin Cathedral and the “Fernsehturm”, beside the River Spree.

…. discover Berlin, this exciting city with its unusual history. Get an impression of the present-day Berlin: fashionable,

creative, international and busy - but there are still these typical neighbourhoods, called “Kiez”, where life seems slowing down.

For more information and to register for the event please click here.

One of Canada’s largest banks recently migrated from ACI Worldwide’s BASE24 payments transaction switch to Lusis Payments’ TANGO solution. During the migration process, time-critical testing procedures were required. The bank turned to TANDsoft’s OPTA2000 clock- and time-zone simulator.

A longtime TANDsoft customer, the bank originally used OPTA2000 to consolidate five test groups, each with its own NonStop S-Series server, into two test groups sharing two NonStop Integrity servers (now Blades). The test groups are responsible for ensuring the functionality of new applications or application upgrades before they are placed into production. Many of the applications being tested, e.g., custom applications and third-party products, are time-sensitive and must be tested under different date/time scenarios. The User Acceptance Testing (UAT) groups employ OPTA2000’s clock simulation to facilitate acceptance testing of multiple applications running simultaneously on the same server but requiring different date/time environments.

With the migration from BASE24 to TANGO, the bank must ensure all applications are operating properly in the new payments environment before deploying them into production. TANDsoft’s OPTA2000 is the only NonStop solution available for such time-critical simulation.

The OPTA2000 clock- and time-zone simulator allows existing backup, development, and production systems to support worldwide consolidated applications. It is one of TANDsoft Inc.’s most popular products and represents TANDsoft’s expertise in interception technology. OPTA2000 provides date/time simulation and time-zone simulation with no code changes for all HP NonStop Guardian and OSS applications and data bases. Date and time simulation http://bit.ly/1HWP9cd allows organizations to "time travel" their applications in the future or past to test all date and time sensitive logic, eliminating the need to manually change the system clock. Time-zone simulation http://bit.ly/1UTKQIa allows applications to operate in any virtual time zone on a single NonStop server.

TANDsoft’s OPTA2000

● Time-sensitive applications operate with virtual time zones in consolidated data center

● Applications sitting on a server in one time zone can accurately timestamp local transactions generated outside that time zone

● Applications run in “user” time, not “system” time, without interrupting normal system operation

● No need to ever change the system clock. Multiple virtual system clocks on a single NonStop server

● All Nonstop Guardian and OSS programs, programming languages and data bases are supported

● Date and time testing with future time, past time and frozen time

● Accommodates Daylight Saving Time (DST) transition tables

● Requires no application source-code modifications

● Supports in-house, HP, and major third-party solutions, even those where source code is unavailable

● Available for NonStop X and all other NonStop servers.

In addition to OPTA2000, TANDsoft solutions – all certified on NonStop X - include FileSync for automatic file synchronization, replication, and data deduplication; the OPTA suite of interception and trace utilities (OPTA-Trace Online Process Tracer and Analyzer, Recycle Bin, Low Pin Optimizer, and EMS Alerts Online Startup and Termination Capture Utility); Stack Monitor, which alerts developers to the impending threat of a stack overflow; Command Stream Replicator, which logs and automatically replicates TMF-audited/unaudited FUP, SQL/MP and SQL/MX DDL structure and other environment changes to target systems; AutoLib, which automatically loads a user library or a DLL for executing processes; the Enscribe-2-SQL and TMF-Audit Toolkits and the Enscribe-2-SQL Data Replicator, all of which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques; E2S-Lite, which permits efficient, low-cost Enscribe modifications without the need to change a program’s source code; and SDI, a seamless sensitive data intercept API for Enscribe, SQL/MP, and SQL/MX.

For information about TANDsoft solutions, contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Free trials are available. www.tandsoft.com.
 

Find out more about us at www.tandemworld.net