In short: SECOM enables an individual user to log on to the system once, and to perform tasks with functional IDs as needed, without the need to know additional passwords.

When access as a functional user to GUI applications, such as Visual Inspect, or NSM/Web is needed, the password of the target user must be used. This bypasses the security mechanism, provided by SECOM, and is a security breach related to PCI requirements.

Some years ago GreenHouse developed a library that permits the establishment of a Visual Inspect session without the need to know the password of the functional user to be used to run VI with.

We have now developed a product that allows the establishment of NSM/Web sessions for functional users without knowing the related password.

For more details please contact: Carl.Weber@GreenHouse.de

As in previous years comForte will be exhibiting and presenting at this years' BITUG BIG SIG at Trinity House in London on Dec 6.

Thomas Burg, CTO, will talk about 'Encryption of PAN data in BASE24 environments - a case study' and he will touch on a proof of concept that comForte did at a large credit card processor running BASE24 classic. His presentation will describe how the holy grail of “implementing PCI 3.4 without compensating controls” could be achieved: How does it work in principle? How did it play out in practise? What extra hurdles were found and how they were overcome?

If you're running BASE24-classic and protection of PANdata is an issue for you, then don't miss this session.

We are looking forward to seeing you on Dec 6 in London.

Come and see us at these upcoming events in 2012/2013

BITUG BIG SIG, London, UK, Dec 5-6 , 2012

FTUG, Paris, France, Dec 10, 2012

SUNTUG, Tampa, Florida, USA, Mar 8-9, 2013

HP Discover, Las Vegas, USA, June 2013

PCI US Community Meeting, Las Vegas, USA, Sept 24-26, 2013

PCI EU Community Meeting, Nice, France, Oct 29-31, 2013

CONNECT Advanced Technical Boot Camp 2013, San Jose, USA, Nov 3-5, 2013

PCI AP Community Meeting, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Fall 2013

 San Jose, CA: NonStop Technical Boot Camp – Oct 14 – 16 2012

XYPRO recently returned from the NonStop Technical Bootcamp, held at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, and it turned out to be a great event.  There were almost 200 attendees, of which approximately 60% were customers, with the remainder being HP staff and vendor partners like ourselves.  The San Jose location proved to be a major positive, with HP being willing and able to send a large number of technical resources to present, given we were “just down the road”.

 As a result, the agenda was fairly well packed with strong technical content.  XYPRO sent some of our own internal resources for training/general knowledge purposes, and all came away feeling like it was time well spent.

 The majority of the conference consisted of session tracks, focussed on various technical areas, and all were well attended.  The breaks were an opportunity for networking, and for users to consult with the large group of vendors that showed their support for the event by exhibiting and sponsoring.  An important point – the food was generally excellent, and received many positive comments!

At this stage it sounds like a similar event is in the pipeline for next year, at the same venue, so look out for that, and see you there! 

http://www.connect-community.org/?TBC2013

PCI Europe 2012

We had a fantastic time at the Dublin based PCI show. The level off attendance was higher than expected, which along with a very well put together agenda and some very nice networking events, made for an excellent few days on the emerald isle. One of the agenda highlights for me was Mark Gallagher’s presentation that looked at Risk Management in Formula One. Although a far cry from the usual finance and banking look at PCI and Risk, the principles were most definitely the same. We had some great conversations with attendees regarding the current status of their PCI projects and it definitely underlined that XYPRO and its suite of compliance and encryption solutions, is supplying the functionality that people are looking for. The final evening networking event at the Guinness Brewery in central Dublin was superb and I would recommend it to anyone visiting this vibrant city. -  Sean Bicknell

Canada 2012 CTUG Fall Conference - Wrap Up

Somehow we managed to pull it off again with a successful CTUG Fall Conference despite a later than normal start to planning and timing that was a mere week following the HP NonStop Technology Bootcamp event in San José.

 For reasons beyond our control, we of the CTUG board could only deliver the annual conference in the allotted time which was in near direct conflict with the Bootcamp event. Coupled with a slow start, we worried we would not be able to deliver the quality and quantity of past events to all participants. Sometimes it is great to be so wrong!

Although we had a few less vendor partner participants, the customer attendance was a new CTUG record with more than 90 direct customer representatives and a total of more than 140 combined registrants for the conference and education day.

Barry Forbes

VP of Sales & Marketing

XYPRO Technology Corporation

www.xypro.com

It is that time of year again. When most people are looking forward to Christmas and the New Year, you are working desperately to complete projects before that perennial deadline – the end of the Financial Year. Days have disappeared and there are not enough man hours left to complete those tasks that remain outstanding.

This is where BrightStrand International can help. We have skilled and experienced NonStop consultants who can be drafted in to supplement your own staff. This can be to undertake specific tasks in a project or to undertake the day-to-day tasks in your business that will then release your staff to complete project work.

The second BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) part consists of an iOmnivoBase live-demo, featuring a native iOS app, using the iPhone’s built-in camera as a barcode scanner, communicating with a NonStop application.

Learn to deliver push notifications from your Pathway Application to smart phones or tablets via Apple APNS, Google GCM or Windows WPNS.

Breathtaking success story about Modernizing a 300 Dialogues NonStop Application

Please find CommitWork in Paris at the French Nonstop User Group on December 10.

With “300 at one blow” CommitWork will present an extremely short modernizing project course of a 300 dialogues HP NonStop Application. Details will be given about initializing such a project, which modernization steps were taken, and future options are discussed.

Want -

Richard Buckle
Founder and CEO

SecureStore – If you are trying to become compliant (PCI, HIPAA, etc) then you know that you can not leave sensitive data readily viewable. SecureStore does three things for you. The data is encrypted so that you can become compliant. The data is compressed so that your hardware costs are reduced. As part of disaster recovery your data is sent to three (or more) locations so it will be available when you need it. As a bonus for those having trouble with Guardian 4K limits there is no record size.

FastBuild Switch – When building a switch be it ATM-POS, Wire Transfer, EFT, Medical, or any other type of data that needs to get from one place to another, you are usually faced with three choices. Take an existing package and modify your system to match it. Get the vendor to “enhance” their system to meet your needs. Write a new system from scratch. The FastBuild Switch integrates with your existing system, or if you are building from scratch gives you a good start. The switch is also built around the latest HP technology to maximize performance. It integrates several of our other products to maximize cost savings and security. In a cross platform environment it also runs on other non-Guardian HP supplied platforms.

NxFile+ – Provides compression and encryption to Enscribe structured files.  The files are configured through a GUI interface and the results are provided seamlessly to your applications, typically without any code changes.  In addition this provides for dynamic key changes on the fly so data stored at-rest may have it’s encryption keys changed as required.  Because the records can be compressed prior to encryption, it’s also possible to have records which significantly exceed the 4k record size limitations.   The savings in disk I/O typically pay for the overhead of the compression and encryption.

NxLib – NxLib provides a platform and utility libraries for developing a high performance multi-threaded applications on NonStop Guardian. The platform provides threading capability. This enables development of an application written single threaded style to perform as multi-threaded.   Extensible command processing and help are supported.  Development time can be cut to a fraction of the time it would normally take.  This results in fast  application development with consistent look and feel across multiple projects.  Includes logging, command processing, help file, compression, encryption, automatic multi-threading, NonStop, and web enabled.

NxNTP – Keeps your system clocks in synchronization.  Clocks which are out of sync by even fractions of a second can impact replication in an active-active environment as well as be confusing when trying to track transactions which span multiple systems.  Having the correct time is increasingly more important.

NxSSL – Is an SSL proxy which may be used to provide SSL encryption and authentication services to TCP/IP connections.  It provides full support for certificates and multiple encryption standards.  It has been carefully tuned to provide the highest performance available for any NonStop SSL connection.

NxVTape – Provides a high performance file backup facility using standard NonStop backup and restore.  The data is compressed, encrypted, and store on a Windows or UNIX based platform.  Tape drives are created dynamically as needed and any number of drives may be used simultaneously.  Communication is over TCP/IP eliminating the need for special hardware and allowing archival across corporate WANs.

NxWeb – A high performance web server which provides support for NxLib applications.  It also can be used without NxLib.  It provides for secure connections, virtual domains, full http support and interfaces to pathway and IPC communications.  Includes the new web based SYSBUSY.

NxRecover – Files accidentally deleted can be a real problem.  Even when a backup is available, it is frequently a significant effort to retrieve it from a backup tape.  NxUndelete implements a recycle bin function on the the HP NonStop system.  Files deleted may be easily recovered using its GUI interface.

The recent U.S. Presidential election was predicted to have a close outcome, but Mitt Romney and his campaign team were confident that Romney would win.  Their secret weapon?  ORCA – a massive, technologically sophisticated tool that was designed to get out the vote in the critical U.S. states that would swing the election result in Romney’s favor.  Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, ORCA was not properly tested, campaign volunteers were not properly trained in ORCA’s use, and a backup system was virtually unusable.  On Election Day, ORCA crashed almost as soon as the polls opened. This prevented the Romney campaign from receiving accurate information about what they needed to do in order to get more supporters to the polls in states the campaign had to win.  President Obama’s campaign team had Narwhal, a system equivalent to ORCA.  Narwhal was well-tested prior to the election, and it worked perfectly on Election Day.  Learn more about ORCA and its challenges in this month’s Availability Digest. No one will know how a Romney win may have changed the domestic and foreign policies of the U.S.    

Also in the November 2012 Digest: 

How Google Does It – The Digest investigates what is known (or think we know) about Google’s largely secret data-center operations.

Amazon Web Services Downed by Memory Leak – Learn more about what happened on October 27^th when Amazon Web Services (AWS) went offline for six hours. 

FBI Warns that Corporate Employees are New Targets – The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), and other organizations have sounded the alarm that cybercriminals are targeting individual employees and their login credentials.  Instead of hacking corporate systems, which garner large law-enforcement actions, the cybercriminals use the stolen credentials of individual staff members to initiate, for instance, unauthorized wire transfers of substantial monetary funds.

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.  We also offer technical and marketing writing services and are adept at a wide variety of content creation. 

 Trinity Square, Tower Hill, City of London, Greater London EC3N 4DH

BITUG BIG SIG (Thursday 6th December) 
The agenda is still being finalised for this event, however I can reveal that we are all very excited to welcome Gaye Clemson to BITUG for the first time. Gaye is an original Tandem employee and is author of the book “Tandem Computers Unplugged: A People's History” Gaye will be giving the morning keynote presentation and will be bringing signed copies of her book to be given away at the end of the day. 

Following the Keynote we will again be running 3 presentation tracks:

HP Direct Track.
It is once again my pleasure to welcome HP's Mark Pollens to BIGUG, Mark will be working with our HP liaison and BITUG committee member Iain Liston-Brown on the HP track to present the latest product roadmaps and more. 

Payments Solutions Track
We are pleased to present details of NonStop payment software offerings currently available, including Vendor presentations with Q&A. 

Compliance Track
We are pleased to provide the opportunity to concentrate on Audit and Compliance issues effecting the HP NonStop platform today and what solutions are available to help with these. 

Places for this ever popular event are limited to book early

http://bitugbigsig2012.eventbrite.co.uk/

Looking forward to seeing you all again

The next French Tandem Users group meeting will be in Paris on December 10th, all day.

This date has been chosen to let you attend the BITUG and HP Discover the week before.

The exact location is still not yet defined but it will be in Paris or in the very close suburb.

This event is dedicated to french speaking customers, with invitation to french, swiss, belgian, luxembourg customers but the presentations can be done in english.

There is not specific subject to cover, but experiences and references on modernizing customers applications will be welcome.

The format should be the same than previous years including formal presentations slots and booth space for you to meet the customers.

For your information, most customers in France are now running on small Itanium NS-Series servers some very few still running on S-Series.

Please let me know if you plan to come and I'll send you the details when available.

There is no fee to attend this event (HP France will be hosting the event) but your are welcome to carry some goodies for the customers. There should a prize draw for main ones.

 Yves Tournier

NSAS NonStop Availability Services

www.nsas.fr