NonStop ™ Newsletter for February 2019

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Contents

Multi-Factor Authentication on Nonstop Made Easy!

 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is increasingly becoming one of the more critical security requirements on the NonStop platform. MFA provides superior ID verification measures over easily compromised single-password methods. There are also compliance requirements to contend with, such as PCI DSS requirement 8.3, which now calls for organizations to strengthen their access control security with MFA. By changing the terminology of requirement 8.3, two forms of authentication are now the minimum requirement.

Ultimately, any remote user or non-console admin user that has access to the cardholder environment must use Multi-Factor Authentication. From legacy Pathway applications to the latest RESTful interfaces, effective MFA must be provided for users and applications that have the potential to access sensitive data. 

Introducing CSP Authenticator+™

The new CSP Authenticator+™ supports both primary and secondary authentication for NonStop. It provides a  RESTful interface which supports multi-factor authenticated logins on NonStop systems. CSP Authenticator+ resides on the NonStop Platform and uses an OSS “bridge” to connect to the RESTful interface of the CSP Authenticator+ web server.

Primary authentication methods such as RADIUS, RSA Cloud, Active Directory, Oracle ID Manager and Open LDAP are supported. User Rights Synchronization will make it easier than ever before to integrate a NonStop system into the Enterprise ID management platforms.

CSP Authenticator+ can provide authentication services via SafeGuard Authentication SEEP, or Pathway and Non-Pathway servers. Almost any application, including TACL, can now easily support multi-factor authentication. Secondary authentication methods supported include RSA SecurID, Email, Text Message, and Google Authenticator . You can now enable MFA logins for various applications, making them more secure! 

CSP Authenticator+ Workflow

CSP Authenticator+ Key Features Include:

·        Primary and Secondary authentication support

·        Browser-based user friendly interface

·        Standardized authentication across platforms

·        Configurable for all or selected users

·        Certified for the latest RSA release

·        Support for virtual addressing

CSP - Compliance at your Fingertips™

For more information on CSP solutions visit www.cspsecurity.com

For complimentary access to CSP-Wiki™, an extensive repository of NonStop security knowledge and best practices, please visit wiki.cspsecurity.com

We Built the Wiki for NonStop Security ™

Visit us at these upcoming shows to learn more about our exciting solutions for NonStop and beyond:

         SunTUG - Tampa Bay, FL

         March 1, 2019

         ETBC - Edinburgh, Scotland

         May  13-15, 2019

Regards,

The CSP Team              

+1(905) 568 - 8900

 Are you Still on Track?

For those of a certain age group, or for those with a sense of history, you may have been aware of the NonStop Open System Interconnection / Message Handling System (OSI/MHS) subsystem.

Insider Technologies developed “ActionView.400”, the OSI/MHS X.400 monitoring product which was shipped with the older Tandem/HPE NonStop platforms and since December 2018, has been marked by HPE, as obsolete.

However, we support customers in the Government and Military sectors where the monitoring and tracking of X.400 and SMTP/MIME emails is essential to ensure that SLAs are met and every message can be accounted for – for the military especially, a pretty critical requirement one would think?  

Insider also has customers in message tracking arenas for BASE24, XML, MQ, including solutions for “WayPoint”, aka Store-and-Forward mechanisms (SAF), BAM, XML, JMX, again, across multiple platform and vendor environments - all monitored via a single Sentra interface.

A description of two types of our message tracking solutions follows but to start with…

Sentra Architecture

Architectural design for monitoring and tracking email/MTAs across multiple platforms and MTAs.

1) X.400/SMTP Message Tracking

The manual monitoring of these types of protocols requires highly skilled engineers who understand the infrastructure and flow of the messages amongst large-scale global networks.

To assist with their monitoring requirements, our multi-vendor and multi-platform enterprise monitoring solution – Sentra – provides them with an invaluable addition to their toolset.  

Note: Sentra does not interrogate the message content; it is purely concerned with tracking the delivery of messages through their global mail delivery systems.

Government and Defence Message Tracking

Challenge: 

·        Track Government and Defence mail systems processing >100,000 messages per day.

·        Provide an interface so that individual mail items can be tracked and queried.

·        Measure delivery response times for mail.

·        Alert on other attributes such as mail ‘deleted before read’.

·        Interface to a billing system.

·        Monitor the infrastructure that the application executes on.

Solution:

·        Use Sentra’s centralised software installation and management facilities to deploy tracking software to >200 remote, multi-vendor platforms and multi-vendor MTAs.  

·        Relay SMTP and X.400 email data from the remote nodes to the standard Sentra facilities for storage and analysis.

·        Create service level rules to prove timely delivery of mail.

·        Issue an alert when as SLA has not been met. 

·        Alerts viewed by engineers via a tailored Sentra web console.

Outcome: 

·        Proof that Customer Service Levels are being met.

·        This data helps to influence charging tariffs.

·        Pro-active fault resolution.

·        No lengthy analysis, as all provided via a single web interface

Top-level example for an MTA infrastructure based at Insider.

Drill-downs available to show message flows per platform and per SMTP/MTA agent. This is an extremely simple example compared to our Government and Military configurations.

Graphical Message Tracking

Graphical message tracking results allow you to see clearly, what happened to any given message without having to look inside it. In the example below, you can view the path the message has taken and obtain individual diagnostics.

Message Tracking Results

Drill-down from any point in the diagram to get detailed diagnostics from the MTA.

Message Diagnostics

Highlighted alert detail.

2) WayPoint (SAF) Message Tracking

Payments, messages can be sent across multiple platforms.  

Each message contains a particular id that is stored within Sentra, where its inbuilt correlation engine will track the required journey.

A series of XML agents are deployed to key monitoring points (WayPoints) within a payment / messaging processing infrastructure to monitor the message flows and calculate transaction volumes and trends, payment volumes and trends and end-to-end processing times.

Based on the Sentra stored data, rules can be configured to monitor service level compliance and abnormal processing volumes. Trend charts, alerts, queries can be created via the Sentra browser interface.

Note: A single Sentra installation provides this fully encompassed monitoring and tracking solution.

Without Sentra WayPoint Tracking

Messages stored on each platform, with no waypoint tracking to determine for example, where the message is; if it is meeting its SLA delivery time; if there is any corruption.

With Sentra WayPoint Tracking

Sentra Correlation Engine

I trust this article will illuminate you as to how we at Insider Technologies are pretty creative in providing in-depth tracking solutions for all types of messages, across any vendor and any platform; not just on HPE NonStop.

  hello@insidertech.co.uk

+44 (0) 161 876 6606

In August 2017, SpaceX delivered an HPE supercomputer to the International Space Station. The effort was part of a year-long NASA experiment to determine whether a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system could operate within a harsh environment for a year, roughly the time it takes to travel from Earth to Mars. The verdict? An unmitigated success!

Most hardware designed for space is hardened, thereby increasing both weight and cost. Instead, HPE’s Spaceborne computer tested the concept of software hardening. Spaceborne’s hardware is straight out of the factory and is a two-server HPE Apollo system. The system has performed virtually problem-free in zero gravity, with irregular cooling and electric power, and with varying levels of radiation.

“HPE’s Spaceborne Computer Survives a Year on ISS” is one of several articles in recent issues of the Availability Digest. In addition to this story, read the articles below as well as others.

China Infiltrates U.S. Companies - In 2015, Amazon began evaluating a startup company called Elemental Technologies. Elemental specialized in multiscreen video, and Amazon believed that the technology would help with its streaming video service known as Amazon Prime Video. However, Amazon uncovered troubling issues with the Elemental servers that customers installed to handle video compression. Amazon had Elemental send several servers to a security company for testing, which revealed on the motherboards a tiny microchip that was not part of the original design. Investigators found that the chips allowed attackers to create a doorway into any network to which the altered servers were attached. From where did the chips come? China.

CenturyLink Takes Down 911 Service – A U.S. nationwide outage of telcom company CenturyLink’s network lasted almost two days as staff scrambled to pinpoint the root problem. It turns out that the disruption was caused by a faulty third-party network management card in one of CenturyLink’s data centers. The incident is an example of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome, a concept borrowed by computer scientists from the Disney film Fantasia. In the case of CenturyLink, one of its networks sent out packets of bad information. The packets were replicated and resent over and over. Eventually, the system bogged down and crashed.

Swapping Replication Engines with Zero Downtime (Part 3) – This 3-part series focuses on swapping a data replication engine for another replication engine without the need for downtime. Part 1 explained how the engine swap can take place even with different engine versions from the same manufacturer or with an engine from a different vendor. Part 2 described how such a zero-downtime migration (ZDM) can be enhanced by adding one or more additional nodes. In Part 3, we examine swapping engines while maintaining consistent, complete, and up-to-date databases.

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. Popular seminars are devoted to achieving fast failover, the impact of redundancy on availability, basic availability concepts, and eliminating planned downtime.

The Digest provides a variety of technical writing, consulting, marketing, and seminar services. Individuals too busy to write articles themselves often hire us to ghostwrite. We also create white papers, case studies, technical manuals and specifications, RFPs, presentation slides, web content, press releases, advertisements, and so on.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please join our 805 members at the Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.

 

If you are not using Web Services with your NonStop applications, you are missing out on a lot of its benefits, including application reusability and interoperability.  And if you are using SOAP web services, it is time that you look at migrating to REST to take advantage of its benefits over SOAP.

Learn more about how to adopt REST for your NonStop applications by attending our upcoming webinar:
How to quickly Implement RESTful applications using LightWave
Wed, Mar 13, 2019 10:00 AM - 11000 AM EDT
Click this ink to register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7380957083157128195

Product Information: LightWave Product Suite
https://ticsoftware.com/Solutions/Modernize/LightWaveRESTSuite.aspx
  
Read our blog:   Overview of REST
https://ticsoftware.com/blog/index.php/what-is-rest-web-service/

For more information, please contact Sales-support@ticsoftware.com or visit our website https://ticsoftware.com

www.tandemworld.net

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

Our company, Tandemworld, accepts no liability for the content of this email, or for the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided.
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