When is vision all you see?

If you have followed Margo and myself on LinkedIn or even on Facebook you would know all about our recent travels. And yes, also of travels yet to take place. The NonStop community is keeping us busy of late and it’s proving to be a welcome distraction to what we are in the middle of, as you might say. Moving; none of the glamor and all about the pain.

It is not a unique situation we face, but one that many others have apparently succumbed to; a lingering COVID ailment that we are managing, but with consequences. Living in mountainous Colorado for all of its beauty is no longer part of any long-term plans. Indeed, our vision for the future is to live somewhere closer to sea level where increased atmospheric pressure will work its magic.

With this in mind, what has been the center of our frequent travels between our former home in Windsor and a newly acquired condo accommodation is that it’s not just about the pain of boxing and unboxing your possessions – it is that while we have a vision, we are hard pressed translating that into something more tangible. Something we can see clearly, details and all!

For the HPE NonStop community, HPE has provided us with an increasingly focused vision. It’s all about Hybrid IT, of providing Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) and bringing the cloud experience to you. In response to what has become a priority for many enterprises, resilience and reliability have entered the discussion, but about this Margo and I are looking forward to the upcoming HPE Discover 2024 event where we are hoping to hear more about resilience – in particular, the most important resilience of all, that being Business Resilience – together with Hybrid IT.

A series of brief exchanges with HPE executives has led me to believe that yes, AI together with Quantum will also receive attention with potentially the spotlight beamed on them during keynote presentations at HPE Discover. But for more on that it is now just a case of waiting to see but all indications suggest that there will be some very interesting updates coming from the HPE leadership team. Of course, it is for moments like this that we all make time for this annual HPE major big-tent marketing event of the year.

A major talking point from the presentations I have already made this year is the emphasis I have been placing on Business Resilience. It is not a surprise really as I see Business Resilience as embracing multiple “resiliencies.” Take Cyber and Cyber Security Resilience. Consider too Digital and Digital Data Resilience. Or perhaps it’s more about Operation Resilience where the need to protect IT from itself continues to attract deep consideration as after all, much that can go wrong within IT comes from bad actors present within the data center.

For me, and where I have taken the conversation on Resilience, it’s been essentially backtrack to what I call first principles. For a business to be resilient it needs to be able to ensure that it can deliver its objective and to survive and prosper. Leave it to the folks at PwC to sum it all up even better when they described Business Resilience as:

“Business Resilience builds on the principles of business continuity but extends much further to help enhance an organizations’ ‘immune system; fend off illness (to) bounce back more quickly’” 

One such NonStop vendor that I work very closely with, NTI, has embraced this as, no surprises here, the path from Disaster Recovery (DR) to Business Continuity to Business Resilience as a path that even those lacking 20/20 vision can see clearly. Fending off enterprise illness may be one way to describe unplanned disruptions caused by bad actors, but for the NonStop customer, increasingly participating in the world of Hybrid IT, it’s just another form of outage where having a vision isn’t enough. Putting plans in place has become imperative.  

Before delving further into plans, it’s important to see what is meant by resilient. According to the papers and posts I have read of late (and included in my recent and yes, future presentations), resilience is all about absorbing, adapting and transforming to better accommodate all that is taking place in the market segment the business operates. By this we mean, embracing change in a way that like an illness, needs to happen in order for the business to remain in business. If I was to return to the topic of vision and to the view it may project, I am having trouble seeing where such insightfulness is finding its way into operation consideration.

In other words, when is vision ALL that we see? Of course, we know our vision can become blurry at times with distractions interrupting the path we go down. And resilience is no exception. Remember all in on Client Server? Then the panic of Y2K followed with fears over dates that might indicated end of files, etc. Now it is AI and beyond that Quantum? Are we in sight of the end of concerns over Cyber Security and the threat of Ransomware? Surely, we much agree with the pundits who advise us all that even with no demands from Ransomware perpetrators, presence of the bad stuff is already on our systems?

So then what can we see that is of immediate value to our business? Perhaps this recent correspondence from a well-respected source within the NonStop team - yes, none other than our own HPE Distinguished Technologist, Keith Moore - might shed some light on all of this and I reference this in closing:

“The hype is not quite to Y2K levels and not even close to the AI hype, but it is pretty hot topic right now. The Dora specs have upped the ante for playing in the financial services space.  Most every FSI customer needs to be able to address these concerns.

 

“This is ALL a legacy perspective. The current most important place to address the ransomware need is to address current PCI requirement and tokenize all sensitive data. After almost two decades of grace and patience, EVERY FSI customer should already have sensitive data obfuscated at rest. In all cases.

 

“There is no excuse for not doing this immediately. It also addresses about 90% of the risk.   Any security person can list the needs (not in any particular order): Zero Trust, two-factor for all access, encrypt sensitive data at rest, Role-based and access, Audit and use SEIM, Change Control Security (aka DevSecOps) and beyond are networks and computer stuff.

 

“The most likely attack is to STEAL the data, not to take away access to it.

“I wish all of my customers had crackers instead of gold in their chests.   IT’S REALLY THE ONE THING TO DO ASAP; turn the gold into crackers and it is FIXED!”    

The NonStop community is especially blessed with some great security solution offerings. If your vision lacks clarity and you cannot see positive outcomes then think of turning to them. Ransomware and the like are out there in the world of hybrid IT and with the participation in today’s IT environments the NonStop customer needs to be wary, but sometimes all it takes is stepping back to view the basics and taking those easy-to-deploy actions to make it safer for all users. For that I can see only positive outcomes!