ETI-NET – A new fiscal year and a time for customer requirements reviews

Barely a day passes without major stories making headlines as one of the large enterprises talks up the benefits of cloud computing. These enterprises are typically talking about the business benefits that come from moving their processes and data to one big cloud computing vendor or another. For these enterprises, it’s all about showing a preference to run on someone’s computer rather than to continue to invest in in-house equipment and support resources. However, when it comes to major stories making headlines there are almost as many that discuss security breaches together with violations of cloud computing vendors’ policies.

When it comes to the NonStop community, “cloud is still in its infantile stage ” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “From what we are hearing, it still is very much a case of on-prem deployments of the mission-critical business applications although it is hard to ignore the number of times we read about HPE and its promotion of the ‘cloud experience.’” ETI-NET can only surmise at this point that there will be some introduction of private clouds into enterprise data centers where NonStop might gain a foothold, but even so, it’s very early days, and we have coverage in all GEOs, and the story is the same. “Not quite yet seems to be the common response,” said Tétreault.

It is the start of a new fiscal year for ETI-NET, and the company takes this time as an opportunity to review customer requirements and to review the product roadmaps for BackBox (BB). It has been this process where our insights into cloud computing and the cloud experience have been gained. However, what is escalating in priority for our customers “has more to do with security and compliance,” Tétreault acknowledged to industry watchers interested in knowing more about ETI-NET and its response to the changing data center dynamics. “When we approach the topic of security and compliance, this is a two-way exchange,” added Tétreault. “What our customers are looking at how ETI-NET is improving its product portfolio with respect to security as well as looking to us and our internal procedures when it comes to managing our source, customers’ data, etc.”

What we have observed to date with these reviews is that there is an immediate impact on our product roadmaps and we are now highly focused on security and compliance and the value we can add that mitigates many of the concerns our customers have expressed of late.  However, when it comes to the NonStop community, from our own discussions with other NonStop vendors, this is the subject of a lot of activity across the entire NonStop community, leaving us to understand that our continued investment in security and compliance with the BB product portfolio is an important requirement for 2021.

Gartner covered this topic in a presentation, Develop an Effective Compliance Program –

“Building a corporate compliance program that can keep up with changing laws, emerging risks, and new regulations is increasingly difficult.

“Only 16% of compliance and ethics leaders feel confident in their ability to add meaningful insights on organizational risk, and less than a third feel confident in their ability to demonstrate the effectiveness of their program.

“To be impactful, compliance programs must be built into the operations of the business rather than functioning as a separate process tacked onto employee workflows and systems.”

Given greater attention to security and compliance is just one topic that has attracted our attention. Technology continues to evolve, and “we are planning updates of newer technologies,” said Tétreault. “This includes migrating to Windows 2019, HPE ProLiant G10+, new Atto Fibre Channel (FC) card interfaces, new storage versions from EMC Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce, and finally improving our full integration with QoreStor.” Together with these upgrades come new opportunities as the raw performance obtainable also rises. This has created the need to push performance testing to the maximum in order to meet our large customer requirements for performance and fault tolerance. “Naturally enough and something we recognize at the start of each fiscal year,” Tétreault observed. “This requires us to revisit our lab inventory each year and constantly improve our environment.”

Cloud computing may still be ways off, but its impact on the enterprise cannot be understated. There are enterprises today that have made commitments to cloud computing vendors, but from our observations of the NonStop community, we see its attention continues to remain focused on on-prem deployments. HPE continues to emphasize the cloud experience, and we are watchful of any impact that this might have on the plans of the NonStop user community, but for now, the more immediate concerns arising from our customer reviews are about security and compliance, compatibility with the latest technology and continued fine-tuning of our overall performance. These constitute the most important requirements of ETI-NET as we move through 2021.

Should you have any questions about our product offerings and want to know more about our plans for this year, don’t hesitate giving us a call or sending us an email.

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501

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