Successful Security SIG

Thursday the 8th of October saw XYPRO’s British contingent (Sean and myself, Dan) heading to London for the fourth British Isles Tandem User Group (BITUG) Special Interest Group (SIG) of the year – the subject matter being very close to our heart: security.

The location was Hewlett Packard’s Wood Street offices in Moorgate, central London. If you’re a fan of Google Earth and ever find yourself visiting those offices, make sure you take a quick trip up to the top floor in one of the glass elevators – you’re assured a great view! Back to business: HP deserve a special thanks for providing their facilities, food and refreshments.

The day started off with a Connect/GTUG update (event in Germany on 18th and 19th November, with optional Security Workshop on the 20th). The two day conference element appears to have a feature-packed schedule of around seven different tracks. For any non-German speakers considering a visit, just one of those tracks is in German, so the vast majority will be in English and ideal for international visitors. We’ll update the XYPRO news feeds as soon as the schedule is completed.

Next up was an HP Security update from Iain Liston Brown who covered several products, including the use of XYPRO’s XYGATE Merged Audit (XMA) when using HP’s Compliance Log Warehouse (CLW) with NonStop servers. This was followed by an interesting presentation by James Tomaney of Barclays. Most of the ears in the room pricked up when he broached the successful move from IBM to NonStop for Barclays’ ATM network.

The afternoon saw three vendor presentations, including XYPRO’s Audit in the Enterprise. An interesting point raised was the submissions made to the DataLoss Database website, point your browser toward http://datalossdb.org/ for some rather alarming reading.

Last up was Ron LaPedis’ Volume Level Encryption presentation, exploring the various potentials for NonStop data loss and what can be done to prevent the loss and/or encrypt the data.

It was a shame that the PCI Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) had to pull out of his presentation, as I’m sure that would have made for some useful information, but that didn’t take anything away from what was still a very useful day. Fingers crossed we’ll revisit the subject of PCI compliance on NonStop in a future event – the next one being the BITUG ‘Big SIG’ on 3rd December in London (and education day on 2nd).

With the Security SIG now out of the way, the BITUG team will be turning their attention to dotting the Is and crossing the Ts on the Big SIG plans. Keep your eye on the XYPRO news feeds (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, XYPRO.com etc.) and www.bitug.com   for more info.

Dan Lewis
European Marketing Manager
XYPRO Technology Corporation