BITUG Little SIG – December 8, 2022

The BITUG Little SIG was held at Barclays Bank Canary Wharf on Thursday 8^th December 2022. As with all Little SIGs it was a single track event over one day with a mix on Partners and HPE presenting. It was a chance to highlight some of the topics discussed at the recent NonStop Technical Boot Camp. The audience was around 1/3 customers, 1/3 vendors and 1/3 HPE and the discussions were lively and engaging.

A key focus was on security with a number of vendors discussing the implications of PCI DSS 4.0 regulations which will be fully in force by mid-2025. Multi-factor Authentication, Zero Trust Security and Data Centric Security were key discussion topics with 4Tech, comforte and Xypro all outlining aspects of the regulations and how they have solutions to help customers comply with the new regulations.

NTI discussed data integration and being able to integrate information from NonStop applications into business intelligence and analytics tools such as Kafka.

HPE presented two sessions:

The first was entitled “So you think you know NonStop”. The key aspect to this session was identifying the modernization and simplification that has been rolled out and is core to future developments for NonStop as a platform. This included how HPE has improved the deployment and management of virtualized NonStop and demonstrated at TBC virtualized NonStop running in Microsoft Azure Skytap in London and Google Cloud in Los Angeles where RoCE and VMware can be supported. The development investigations to look at removing RoCE constraints and also being hypervisor agnostic were also discussed and this would open up running virtualized NonStop in AWS.

In addition this session also looked at the modernization of the application and development environment such as bringing API access supporting development of micro services and also exposing traditional applications as a service via APIs. This in conjunction with the work to bring Database Services and the compatibility layer including PL/MX to the NonStop SQL Database supported by DevOps tools provides for Bimodal IT with scalable and available applications without adding “plumbing” complexity to application developers.

The second session was about modernizing the security environment with a modular approach to implementing zero trust security, reducing the burden of compliance reporting and taking a systems approach to proactive real time machine learning and security threat detection. Part of this approach also helps protects from Ransomware and the session outlined where to harden on a NonStop platform to avoid this.

Finally there was a discussion about the implementation and learning of a UK customer who has implemented multi-factor Authentication on their NonStop systems using the Xygate User Authentication (XUA) security software shipped with every NonStop X server.

In 2023 it will all be happening for the NonStop community in Edinburgh. To be held May 15^th – 17^th the city will play host to the eBITUG 2023 European User Group conference.  To stay informed about all that will be revealed about this conference make sure you check in regularly at the BITUG web site –  

www.bitug.com