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Engineers often discuss perpetual motion. The idea is honorable even as it is hardly ever associated with IT. Imagine running the same system until “the eventual heat death of the universe,” as engineers like to state. Bold: The same products, supported by the same personnel, generating the same reports from the same inputs. It’s all very predictable. It is an observation, however, that has no bearing on the direction of today’s computing technology and, for IT professionals, is an anathema. Continuity forever? Hardly!
There has never been room for the status quo regarding computer systems, their networks, and the data they oversee. A perpetual motion may describe some environments theoretically, even as the physical world views it as an impossible concept. On the other hand, momentum in the physical world is real. It portrays an image of movement, of objects that can neither be created nor destroyed and yet, what we all like about momentum is that it conveys progress.
We have now rung in the New Year, and the celebrations continue for the NonStop community. Nothing is more exciting than having new NonStop systems becoming available and already hearing of plans for major system refreshes. What is also new is the rebranding of the annual NonStop TBC event, as with 2025, it will become known as the HPE NonStop Technical and Business Conference! Strengthening the focus on business as much as technology is a welcome change.
Any observation about changes in 2025 cannot be complete without ETI-NET congratulating Neil Davis, who has become the NonStop Global Sales Director at HPE. A true and welcome reward for his work in EMEA and, more recently, with the added responsibility of LATAM. ETI-NET looks forward to working closely with Neil as opportunities for NonStop arise anywhere around the globe.
Momentum? If previously we argued in favor of the status quo, then it’s time to rethink our priorities. Nowhere has this fueled more lively conversations than when ETI-NET has taken the message of Batch Processing to the NonStop community. Batch? Surely not, and yet, from the time NonStop took on responsibility for supporting mixed workloads, batch played an important role.
Transaction processing may be the forte of NonStop, but eventually, IT professionals need to pass on the results of their endeavors to operational teams. Weekly volumes, monthly figures, and annual reports. As much as the NonStop community would like to assign this to other IT professionals, in today’s world of Clouds and Hybrid IT NonStop has a newfound presence, there is no escaping the need for batch.
ETI-NET provides the NonStop community with the premier batch scheduling and automation subsystem, MultiBatch. Supplanting the need to retain the prior, and now legacy, subsystems, NonStop NetBatch, and NetBatch+, with ETI-NET MultiBatch, the NonStop community has access to subsystems that can be relied upon for deployment at the very heart of a NonStop environment.
“While NetBatch’s command line and scripting approach had met the original needs of the NonStop community, the emerging requirements of IT for vastly improved security, modernization, and open system coordination has driven NetBatch beyond its original design goals,” said Mike Mitsch, ETI-NET Director, Business Development. “Combined with the lack of HPE NetBatch and NetBatch+ support for bug fixing and new feature inclusion, the need for a secure, modernized, and supported batch environment has driven the evolution of ETI-NET’s MultiBatch.
External to NonStop and yet reflecting situations developing worldwide, Batch Processing has attracted the attention of bad actors. Whether external organizations are funded by state agencies or simply disgruntled employees, the batch can infiltrate the enterprise in numerous ways that can prove disastrous. Lost and corrupted data. Missed schedules. Jobs that fail to be initiated or delayed to where they become ineffective. As a result, momentum has built up over the past couple of years, leading to regulations and mandates designed to mitigate any risk of intrusion by bad actors.
Regulatory authorities have become aware of such vulnerabilities. In Europe, it has been the passage of the Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, that comes into effect on January 17, 2025, when regulations will fully apply to financial institutions within the European Union. It will likely see the US and other countries follow suit at some point. Still, for now, it’s a major wake-up call for all enterprises to perform a deep dive into the steps that they initiate to ensure resilience levels sufficient to ward off bad actors initiating ransomware attacks.
“With DORA, Europe has pivoted regulations away from mere suggestions to where companies must act,” said Mike Mitsch. With the pivot, there has been an industry-wide recognition of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF). Major enterprises are becoming reliant upon the Digital Resilience Framework that has emerged from the NIST CSF as it provides comprehensive guidance and best practices that organizations can follow to improve information security and cybersecurity risk management.
“The genesis of MultiBatch follows best practices established to maximize NonStop job efficiency by taking advantage of all NonStop estate resources, said Mike Mitsch. “MultiBatch deploys process pairs built around a BMON that is checkpointed and is aided by a BCOM. All standard, fair, and recognizable as such by any NonStop developer. This allows scalability and, with scalability, the capability of supporting multiprocessing of scheduled batch jobs, thereby improving overall performance.”
What is just as important when it comes to compliance and identifying and monitoring the assets MultiBatch itself relies upon – tables, files, and databases, as well as supporting subsystems Pathway, Enscribe, TMF, and more – MultiBatch meets these stringent compliance requirements. “Looking after itself is critical,” said Mike Mitsch, “and in this respect, MultiBatch delivers.”
As for the bigger picture, within an organization, NonStop customers are as aware as their business peers of ever-evolving cybersecurity risks. Understanding the organization’s assets (e.g., data, hardware, software, files, systems), suppliers, and related risks is the foundation to protect against attack vectors and bad actors wherever they reside. This is the foundation of assets IT professionals charged with the oversight of NonStop batch processing prioritize for their own efforts, consistent with the organization’s risk management strategy.
“What stands out with regards to MultiBatch offering enhanced protection,” said Mike Mitsch, “is the ‘separation of duties’”, recognized by cybersecurity advocates as a risk management principle where critical tasks are divided among multiple users, preventing any single person from having complete control, this mitigates the risk of insider threats, errors, or malicious activity. “With MultiBatch, no one person has the ability to perform all steps of a critical process alone, ensuring checks and balances are in place.”
By splitting responsibilities, it becomes harder for a single individual to exploit vulnerabilities or commit fraudulent actions. “Users should only be granted the minimum level of access needed to perform their assigned tasks. More importantly, those tasked with administration of the creation of jobs are not those in operations who are tasked with their execution.”
Momentum isn’t a one-time event. Neither is it a description of activities that run endlessly. However, across IT, there is a realization that times change and that new situations develop that demand action from all parties involved. 2025 marks the beginning of greater attention being given to compliance with regard to cybersecurity. Legacy products that are in an End-of-Life state are not being enhanced to support the ever-evolving threats. MultiBatch, on the other hand, is a fully supported and enhanced NonStop batch processing product, which ETI-NET is pleased to describe as the premier subsystem that not only delivers enhanced performance and functionality for NonStop Batch Processing, MultiBatch delivers the compliance requirements of the latest regulations such as DORA requires.
A perpetual motion may be regarded as little more than a pipe dream. However, when it comes to momentum, it is a recognition that change continues unabated. Perhaps even more important still, momentum builds upon itself and in this case, as HPE’s investment in NonStop continues, there is the promise of more advantages for NonStop customers still to come.
If you missed the recent webinar on MultiBatch and how it addresses DORA, then simply follow this link –
https://etinet.com/resources/type/webinars
If you missed the previous fireside chat on this same topic, MultiBatch, it can be found by using this link –
https://etinet.com/resources/multibatch-fireside/
Keep checking back to the ETI-NET website as there are more fireside chats in the works, and we look forward to your participation. Should you have any questions about MultiBatch or any other products from within the ETI-NET product portfolio, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Watch too for updates as to where you can hear us firsthand, as in 2025; we will be participating in events and conferences worldwide.
Web – http://etinet.com Phone – (514) 395 1200
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