NTI: From absorbing change and adapting to delivering business resilience

Business Resilience? Meet the offense!

History has confirmed that maintaining the status quo rarely ever works out for practitioners. Whether it has to do with the environment, personal security, or technology as a whole, it is markets that tend to dictate the need to embrace a continuum of change. When it comes to the NonStop community, rarely has doing nothing been an answer. Likewise, locking away your NonStop systems and running the same software stack that was originally delivered cannot assure the level of support for business applications required in these times.

At NTI, this has been the catalyst for increased activity around the DRNet®/Unified product suite. As the premier solution for business continuity, NonStop customers have come to the realization that with replication comes the answer to many of the data needs of the enterprise. Fresh data created on NonStop is all well and good as an anthem but unless it is replicated to where insights can be gained, then it is only a partial answer. Today’s enterprises are becoming more attuned to the benefits of analytics and these enterprises look for the data created on NonStop to become an active participant for analytics to provide the all-important insights.

“Our position as the premier solution for business continuity has been confirmed this year,” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Global Director Worldwide Sales. “In the most recent migration evaluation performed by a major financial institution, NTI was awarded the business through the strength of our product, DRNet®/Unified, and the knowledge of our support team. This was a major win and represented the best way to migrate off Oracle’s GoldenGate even as it was also a highly competitive situation where alternate products proved less effective than the offering from NTI.”

Winning may not be everything, but with the most recent successful customer evaluation it makes the news from elsewhere rather dated; status quo not only rarely works but is always at risk when something better comes along. What is driving the success of DRNet®/Unified and whereas imitation may be the Sincerest Form of Flattery it comes back to the origination of the NTI program to augment business continuity through data replication with data integration, distribution and transformation. A journey that started more than thirty months ago that has led to where today DRNet®/Unified can be viewed as a fabric upon which the NonStop user can rely for building infrastructure that is completely data driven.

NTI has identified a four-step approach that takes DRNet®/Unified beyond data replication for disaster recovery to where it meets the challenge of business resilience. “When you consider that NonStop being fault tolerant represents a starting point for a single system deployment and disaster recovery represents greater maturity and situational awareness when multiple, geographically disperse NonStop systems are deployed,” said Dunne. “Then leveraging the fabric of DRNet®/Unified allows the NonStop user to move beyond defending against system wide and geographically separated outages, to where an offense can be mounted.”

How this translates into the real world is with the addition of support for business resilience. There is an industry standard for business resilience – ISO 22316:2017 – that defines it as “The ability of an organization to absorb and adapt in a changing environment to enable it to deliver its objectives and to survive and prosper.” Yes, the combination of fault tolerance and business continuity defends an enterprise whereas with business resilience these same enterprises can now mount an offense.

What does an enterprise, having embraced business resilience, consider as its offense? Just as an offensive line in American football is there to protect the playmaker – the quarterback – and then, just as importantly, pushes forward to open the way for new plays so it is in the world of business. To grow market share in the business world, an enterprise not only has to be on the defensive about its core competencies but also has to absorb and adapt to change and, with the business resilience that is embraced, open the way to new products and services. Simply stated, the status quo of doing the same-o, same-o, means an enterprise is losing market share and no business leader wants to be caught explaining why such a circumstance has eventuated.

Now, it would be foolish to ignore the many aspects that a business faces in strengthening its resilience. One word describes business owners’ biggest fear and that is Ransomware. Cyber resilience is equal to business resilience when you step back and look at the bigger digital resilience landscape. NTI recognizes that it cannot address all of the issues raised by Ransomware alone. In truth, no single NonStop vendor can provide the answers, despite the many PowerPoint slides devoted to the topic (and that will be heavily featured in presentation during NonStop TBC2023 Conference). This recognition of no one vendor having all the answers is the driving force behind NTI building a partner ecosystem.

It will be hard to miss the amount of attention given to partner ecosystems by NTI as it will take a combination of products to adequately address true digital resilience – business and cyber included. A realization of a long-held belief by NTI that there is everything to gain from working together, this partner ecosystem continues to attract adherers. Look at any NonStop vendor website and there will be lists of partners in cooperation with that vendor and this has been a long-standing tradition among the NonStop vendor community. What we are seeing today with the actions of NTI simply represents a continuation of this tradition.

For an overview of the candidate NonStop vendors making a contribution to business resilience, it has become clear that not all of them are readily promoted by the NonStop sales teams. This is quite understandable as NonStop sales teams have their own priorities and their own a la carte menu. It is with this understanding that the NonStop community has gotten behind the latest communications initiative, the Global NS Partner Alliance (@GNSALLIANCE).

If you ever wonder what the NonStop vendors might be discussing among themselves when they get together for a NonStop TBC Conferences, rest assured it’s almost always focused on how best to meet changing NonStop customer demands. In this case, it has led to the creation of a Global NS Partner Alliance portal with CSP Security leading the way. Being an early vendor to the party, NTI is an active participant and a proud supporter of this initiative. When it comes to giving the NonStop user community a bird’s eye view of the options open to them, knowing that there is one site to visit that will include the many options available to them can only be beneficial to all NonStop stakeholders.

Today, NTI shows leadership with business continuity and has the wins to back it up. NTI has understood the changes that come with being a data driven enterprise and in so doing has absorbed these changes and adapted to the new market needs. Most important of all, with DRNet®/Unified product suite, NonStop users have a clear path laid out for them that leads to business resilience. These are the four-steps underpinning the approach NTI has taken – data replication (business continuity), absorption and adaptation (continuous adaptation), partners sharing information (vendor ecosystems) and crisis reduction (business resilience).

Come to this years NonStop TBC 2023 Conference to hear it all, but if after reading this article  your immediate need is for data focused products that bring business resilience to your company and you would like to know more about how DRNet®/Unified meets those business needs, simply call the number below or email us at any time at:

Sales@network-tech.com

Network Technologies International, Inc.
635 Park Meadow Road, Suite 209
Westerville, Ohio 43081-2877

Phone: +1 (614) 794-6000

N.T.I. Limited
Ard Mhuire
Camp Street
Oughterard
Co. Galway
H91 K5PE
Ireland