NonStop ™ Newsletter for January 2021

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Gravic Publishes New Article, only the Truth: ...

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As we leave behind 2020 and eagerly anticipate all that 2021 will bring, we look forward to continually sharing HPE Shadowbase news with you. Look for future releases regarding:

• Several new products and major updates to existing products, including HPE Shadowbase Zero Data Loss (ZDL) for NonStop
• Enhancements to Shadowbase log source replication for Oracle
• Shadowbase Faster Compare™ for improving our automated parallelism and leveraging our blocking technology
• Extensions to our DDL conversion capabilities, including SBCREATP, a new utility to map SQL/MP table schemas into target database formats
• Extensions to our DDL replication for all the NonStop databases we support
• Additional data transformation options for the source databases we support (SBMAP extensions)
• For more information, please visit: ShadowbaseSoftware.com.

With 2020 finally in the books, it’s time to look forward and discuss our cybersecurity predictions that will most affect the industry in 2021.

I thought long and hard about what I could say that would be impactful and hasn’t been said before.  Obviously, COVID-19 and it’s security ramifications will continue to stay with us for 2021 and well beyond. What we previously predicted and planned for in 2020 was flipped on its head, turned around and flipped over again several times. Even the best laid plans had to be adapted this past year. Looking back, a lot of what we predicted back at the beginning of 2020 was never properly addressed and remains a risk today. For example, credential theft and attacks targeting privileged user logins continue to dominate in the headlines, though the targets of the attacks broadened to include coronavirus vaccine research.

Back in November of 2019, I said the best way to combat these attacks is to use multi-factor authentication (MFA). Use it for everything. There is no simpler way to say it – but this is still not being done.  Until we demand and implement multi-factor authentication for access, making it the standard, risk will continue to increase in 2021. I cover this past advice and other cybersecurity predictions for 2021 in the list below. 

Experts have been preaching for years about the benefits of multi-factor authentication. Yet I’m still shocked by the lack of adoption throughout the industry. It's one of the biggest bangs for your buck in terms of cyber protection, yet the excuses for why it's not implemented, never end.

According to Microsoft, 81% of data breaches occur because of weak, default or stolen credentials and 99% of these attacks can be blocked by implementing MFA.

MFA is an authentication method where a user is granted access only after successfully presenting two or more of the following pieces of information:

• Something you know (password)
• Something you have (security token)
• Something you are (biometrics)

 All it takes is one compromised account to one legacy application to cause a catastrophic breach and catapult a company negatively into the headlines. With the unfortunate increase in COVID-19 phishing scams targeting remote workers isolated from their day-to-day environments, there is no better time to implement multi-factor authentication across your critical applications, servers and services. If we continue to delay, that time will pass and there will be no excuses left, only breaches that could have been prevented.

Click here to continue reading… XYPRO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Predictions

It’s always mildly interesting to see what’s going on in the mergers and acquisitions market, because we all have a few of our pension investments in these branded companies.  NCR has been around since Cash Registers were a new thing, which thanks to their well-documented website history is sometime in the 1880s, when they introduced the first “incorruptible cashier machine”.

Since then NCR tills have probably taken more money than Bernie Madoff, and subsequently evolved to accept and dispense cash at banks and retail and fuel station locations.  NCR’s acquisition this month of Cardtronics is equally strategic. Cardtronics deploys and operates some 55,000 ATM devices globally and a lot of those are NCR’s own machines.  Cardtronics is one of those companies you may not have heard of but which powers a lot of Cash Machine devices you may well have seen in the merchant community.  Examples include the Allpoint network, Co-op Food, CVS, Walgreens, and Speedway which are just some of the many ATM estates that the companies operates on behalf of its merchants.  Cardtronics competes with other independent ATM deployers and financial institutions.

This leads NCR into a role where they will be competing for ATM business with the very same financial institutions where they sell their ATMs.  What might this mean though for the other ATM devices that Cardtronics now operates?  Will NCR slowly replace all their competitor’s devices, which include Hyosung, Triton, Diebold, and Chungho?

What does this mean for OmniPayments?  What we are starting to see is that the market for ATM switches is actually narrowing.  Companies with their own ATM estate are finding their choice of ATM switches starting to narrow as these companies grow larger and their focus on the customer diminishes.

OmniPayments recent partnership with Synchrony bears testimony to the fact that many card issuers and transaction acquirers still want the ability to focus on their core values, keep and maintain their NonStops, modernise their application platforms while managing their long-term costs.

Synchrony operates one of the most comprehensive private label card offerings for business in the United States.  Synchrony needed to digitally transform their payments engine into an e-commerce engine so they could process a broader transaction set for their card customers, and they needed to embrace the power of JSON and XML messages without changing a single line of code in their existing operational platform.  Only OmniPayments could deliver this to them.

Let’s remind ourselves of the true OmniPayments Digital Payments Platform benefits:

OmniPayments helps payments institutions who need to integrate their payment methods and channels, issue card products both virtual and real, or who acquire payment transactions from a broad choice of consumer payment tokens, or who want to expand payment choices for their clients.  We provide opportunities to streamline payment technology and improve bottom-line profitability. 

Our Customers today run profitable businesses of their own, and continue to improve their profit margins with Return on Investment figures of only a few months.

Whether you want to issue emergency payment vouchers, issue payment tokens to mobiles, process QR code payments, accept traditional card payments, consider our rapid private cloud-based solution to get you up and running in weeks.

Follow OmniPayments on Twitter at @omnipayments, LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/omnipayments/ visit our website at www.omnipayments.com, or email us at sales@omnipayments.com

It’s all about the speed. TANDsoft’s FS Compare and Repair is the most rapid compare/repair product for use in the HPE NonStop environment. New FS Compare and Repair customers chose the product because it’s fast, really fast. A 1 terabyte multi-partitioned file takes just 10 minutes to compare. Companies now undertaking free trials of FS Compare and Repair want a product that compares their extremely large files in minutes instead of hours. 

Why is FS Compare and Repair so fast? Unlike competitors, this solution operates at the block level and can improve processing times more than tenfold over record file access. FS Compare and Repair identifies, reports, and resolves inconsistencies in live and offline databases. It reads blocks instead of records, compares block hash signatures instead of records, and works on partitions in parallel.

Also improved by block-level access is data quality and audit compliance. Shorter batch windows lead to an increase in the number of application services that can be performed as well as more time for data analytics.

FS Compare and Repair is easy to install, easy to use, and requires zero application modifications. For more information, contact Jack Di Giacomo (+1 514-695-2234 / jack.digiacomo@tandsoft.com) or Dieter Orlowski (+1 303-263-4381 / dieter.orlowski@tandsoft.com).

TANDsoft is a global provider of innovative HPE NonStop software solutions for use in time virtualization, application modernization, security, and business continuity. Our intercept technology is used by many NonStop customers to enhance legacy application functionality with no program modifications. Our newest solutions are FS Compare and Repair and FS Backup and Restore. Check us out at www.tandsoft.com.

In our latest article, Only the Truth: Debunking TMF NonStop Data Protection Myths, we address considerable misinformation regarding the use of TMF and data auditing in general on HPE NonStop systems. Perceptions remain that the use of TMF is superfluous, costly, or has bad performance issues, as well as a lack of understanding or disregard for the data integrity protection benefits offered by TMF. Debunking these myths and leveraging this transformative technology is critical to empowering mission- and business-critical applications and services, and for competitively positioning NonStop applications well into the future.

Far from being an impediment, having a TMF audited database not only offers significant operational, reliability, and data integrity advantages, it also improves overall system performance and can lead to improved system capacity utilization. The migration from a non-audited to an audited application is a straight-forward process using the facilities provided by AutoTMF, and introduces no significant overhead. The myths and other objections raised against the use of TMF auditing and AutoTMF simply do not stand up to scrutiny.

HPE NonStop Shadowbase data replication software captures change data (data created or updated by users and applications) from a transaction log, for example the TMF log on NonStop systems. As data is changed, TMF writes the changes to the transaction log, where they are read by HPE Shadowbase software for replication to a target system or application. Thus, the path to improving your overall non-audited environment runs through a TMF implementation, and the existence of applications using non-audited data is not an impediment to the deployment of an HPE Shadowbase audit-based data replication solution.

We feel strongly about helping companies improve their NonStop applications and databases with auditing, so along with our HPE colleagues, we will gladly assist with running a trial/proof-of-concept with your application and your data, in your IT environment. Seeing is believing! Contact us. 

We are concerned for all of our friends in the HPE and Connect communities and pray that they remain safe through this unprecedented and dangerous situation! For the duration of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Gravic and its Shadowbase Products Group are open and operating with remote support and access. To reach Shadowbase Support, please use your normal Support contact information or use Support. Please use Contact Us for all other inquiries.

www.tandemworld.net

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

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