Name: Maximizing Business Results with Modernized Cloud Strategies
Start: 2023-09-27T16:00:00Z
End: 2023-09-27T16:00:29.000Z
Location: BrightTALK

Zones, LLC, is a global IT solutions provider that delivers products and services to help companies complete their digital transformation – from desktops to the data center – to the cloud and beyond. Zones’ expertise is reflected in their business practices focusing on Digital Workplace, NextGen Networking, Cloud & Data Center, Cybersecurity and more. Zones is a certified Minority Business Enterprise and holds an elite Corporate Plus Certification. They have a proven ability to support many of the world’s largest corporations.

Organizations have invested lots of money and resources in their SOCs to improve threat detection, investigations, and incident response.  Many are also establishing a threat-informed defense by building processes and countermeasures in response to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by cyber-adversaries.

Just how effective are these efforts?  Many organizations don’t really know – until it’s too late.  To avoid surprises and truly understand the efficacy of SOC people, processes, and technologies, smart CISOs are embracing more active security testing.  In this webinar, ESG and Zones will discuss how organizations can use testing to validate and optimize their SOCs.

Validating and optimizing the security operations center (SOC)

The heavy dependence of many organizations on cloud services and infrastructure has become a double-edged sword due to potential vulnerabilities often exploited by malicious cyber adversaries, thereby posing threats of data loss. 

As this shift continues to gain momentum, safeguarding the integrity of data in the cloud becomes a formidable task. However, this challenge provides an opportunity to mitigate risks and enhance operational efficiency. With significant data stored in cloud and SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, a need for solid and cyber-resilient solutions is critical. This is where the expertise and partnership of a seasoned technology ally become crucial. 

Join Christophe Bertrand from Enterprise Strategy Group and Don Bilbrey from Zones to learn how Zones can help bolster your defenses against ransomware and safeguard your Microsoft 365 data assets.

Enhancing Your Cloud and Microsoft 365 Security with Zones

This webinar aims to provide a comprehensive understanding for fostering sustainability in organizations through the integration of digital transformation, governance, quality management, and partnerships with lifecycle services. By embracing digital technologies enables companies to optimize resource utilization, enhance transparency, and make informed decisions to reduce their environmental footprint. 

This session discusses:
• Establishing robust governance structures ensures alignment between sustainability objectives and strategic vision, enabling companies to navigate challenges and drive long-term value.
• Prioritizing quality management systems to drive repeatable processes and the consistent implementation of sustainability measures, while leveraging advanced tools empowers organizations to streamline reporting and proactively address emerging challenges.
• Partnering with lifecycle services providers promotes circularity, minimizes environmental impacts, and taps into specialized knowledge for continuous improvement and innovation in sustainability practices.
• Understand how organizations can nurture sustainable growth, enhance their overall health, and thrive in a competitive and environmentally conscious business landscape."

How Zones Delivers Sustainable Business Outcomes Across Ecosystems

Employees today are using more technology than ever before, and they are increasingly developing preferences about what those technologies should look like, particularly when it comes to employee preference for Apple devices. As a result, companies are working to provide their employees with the technologies and tools they desire to get their jobs done effectively and efficiently. Fundamentally speaking, End User Computing (EUC) is about making this possible. EUC enables users to access the apps and data they need to get their work done in a way that promotes productivity and flexibility without sacrificing security or increasing costs. This user-focused perspective has never been more important than in today’s hybrid workforce, where users can exist in an office or classroom, at home, or anywhere in between. In Zones’ ‘Empowering Employees with End User Computing Solutions,’ we have Chief Architect Aaron Hockett from the Office of the CTO at Zones and ESG’s Senior EUC Analyst Gabe Knuth with us to discuss the importance of a complete end-to-end EUC strategy within your environment and the benefits they provide. Topics for discussion include: -The importance of end user preferences -How to offer flexibility without compromising security or adding management complexity -How employee experience is critical for employee satisfaction, retention, and recruiting -And more

Empowering Employees with End User Computing Solutions

In today's business environments, organizations are tasked to do more with less. In fact, Enterprise Strategy Group states organizations are asked to do 50% more work with the same staff they had just three years ago.  But IT backlog and managing technical debt is only part of the challenge. Understanding the cloud operations including security vulnerabilities, disaster recovery and business continuity all need to be considered when thinking about a modern application and cloud deployment. Optimizing the cost and spending is also a key factor.  Today we will consider these items and more as we provide research and market trend data along with solutions to these organizational challenges. 

In this webinar, we plan to cover:
• Optimizing cloud costs 
• Cloud operations and the impacts to security, disaster recovery and business continuity
• How the cloud can enable to 'do more with less' while managing technical debt and the IT backlog

Accelerate Modern Engagements with Hybrid Cloud

Providing innovation, flexibility and continuity while delivering on an optimized customer experience provides the recipe for success in today's modern business. However, businesses are challenged with the increasing use of social media channels, the rise in the use of managed service providers and the adoption of outsourcings services. This has put strain on IT resources as well as may introduce security and risk concerns. In fact, we find that nearly two-thirds or organizations expect to increase their spending on cybersecurity services (63%) and/or controls and technologies (62%) over the course of 2023. What is your organization's position?
 
Topics planned to cover:
• Analyzing customer data
• Providing an omni-channel experience
• Leveraging modern systems
• Optimizing skills to provide an end-to-end customer experience

ESG’s analysts: IT spending priorities 2023

IT departments are challenged with meeting the hardware, software, security, and support needs of a constantly evolving workforce. To meet these goals, customers can benefit from an end-to-end solution that can help them withstand challenges related to supply chain disruptions, product acquisition, asset and license tracking, and even product decommissioning and disposal.

Register for this webinar to discover how end-to-end lifecycle services are a boon for today’s distributed workforces. George Ganas from Zones and Enterprise Strategy Group’s Gabe Knuth share their thoughts and expertise on this subject matter.

Full-funnel IT lifecycle services simplify distributed workforce management

In this webinar, we will discuss how transforming your service desk can have cascading effects on the overall performance of your IT and business. We will explore how the service desk is the first line of defense for all IT issues and why boosting it can improve the trinity of cost, productivity, and experience. True success for the service desk is achieved when an issue is eliminated before it disrupts the user, rather than just resolving it quickly to minimize dissatisfaction. 

Join us to learn how your service desk can reduce support cost, reduce employee downtime, and eliminate issues even before they disrupt the user.

Revolutionizing the IT service desk: Boosting your first line of defense

The adage “that which does not kill us makes us stronger” fits well for today’s workplace model. Our extreme focus on work from home (WFH) during the pandemic created employee experience (EX) challenges of a different scale. The consequences were severe employee burnout, dwindling organizational citizenship behavior, poor job satisfaction, and increased attrition. Workplace leaders, like you, are now able to focus more on creating an experience-centric workplace, underpinned by empathy, delivering superior user performance and job satisfaction. Join us in this webinar as we discuss: • Why most EX-enrichment initiatives in workplace fail to achieve commensurate benefits • Leveraging digital experience management offerings and XLAs to improve • Top strategies to create an experience-centric workplace

Decoding the Employee Experience (EX) Blackbox

Movement from on-prem, to the private cloud to public cloud and beyond is becoming normal operations. In fact, according to Enterprise Strategy Group's research, 42% of folks surveyed use at least four cloud service providers, which is not surprising given the importance of a distributed or multi-cloud approach in cloud-native strategies. 

Organizations should therefore make it a priority to put in place a unified architecture that can support these hybrid and multi-cloud deployment models. 

Watch this session to hear Paul Nashawaty’s, Principal Analyst at ESG, and Don Bilbery’s, Director of Cloud Services at Zones, advice on how to effectively deploy a hybrid cloud strategy—and why organizations unable to capitalize on the hybrid cloud are often at a disadvantage competitively, strategically, and organizationally.

Hybrid Cloud: What Makes an Effective, and Ineffective, Cloud Strategy

Organizations have invested lots of money and resources in their security operations centers (SOCs) to improve threat detection, investigations, and incident response. To this end, recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research indicates 63% of enterprises are significantly increasing threat intelligence spending. 

For example, many are establishing a threat-informed defense by building countermeasures in direct response to the tactics used by cyber-adversaries. But just how effective are these efforts?  Many organizations don’t really know—until it’s too late.  

To avoid surprises and truly understand the efficacy of SOC people, processes, and technologies, smart CISOs are embracing more active security testing.  

Watch this webinar, featuring ESG Distinguish Analyst Jon Oltsik and subject matter experts from Zones, to view a discussion on how your organization can use testing to validate and optimize your SOC.

True success for the service desk is achieved when an issue is eliminated before it disrupts the user, rather than just resolving it quickly to minimize dissatisfaction. 

In this webinar, we will discuss how transforming your service desk can have cascading effects on the overall performance of your IT and business. We will explore how the service desk is the first line of defense for all IT issues and why boosting it can improve the trinity of cost, productivity, and experience. 

Join us to learn how your service desk can reduce support cost, reduce employee downtime, and eliminate issues even before they disrupt the user.

The Cascading Effects of Enhancing Your IT Service Desk

Providing innovation, flexibility and continuity while delivering on an optimized customer experience provides the recipe for success in today's modern business. However, businesses are challenged with the increasing use of social media channels, the rise in the use of managed service providers and the adoption of outsourcings services. This has put strain on IT resources as well as may introduce security and risk concerns. In fact, we find that nearly two-thirds or organizations expect to increase their spending on cybersecurity services (63%) and/or controls and technologies (62%) over the course of 2023. What is your organization's position? Topics planned to cover: • Analyzing customer data • Providing an omni-channel experience • Leveraging modern systems • Optimizing skills to provide an end-to-end customer experience

Highly Productive Workplace Leveraging Tech Stack of Service Desk

The adage “that which does not kill us makes us stronger” fits well for today’s workplace model. Our extreme focus on work from home (WFH) during the pandemic created employee experience (EX) challenges of a different scale. The consequences were severe employee burnout, dwindling organizational citizenship behavior, poor job satisfaction, and increased attrition.

Workplace leaders, like you, are now able to focus more on creating an experience-centric workplace, underpinned by empathy, delivering superior user performance and job satisfaction.

Join us in this webinar as we discuss:
•        Why most EX-enrichment initiatives in workplace fail to achieve commensurate benefits
•        Leveraging digital experience management offerings and XLAs to improve
•        Top strategies to create an experience-centric workplace

IT departments are challenged with meeting the hardware, software, security, and support needs of a constantly evolving workforce. Today, 74% of organizations have more than 11% of their people working remotely, and 50% of businesses report having to manage an average of 4 to 5 devices per employee (according to recent Enterprise Strategy Group reports).

More OSes and devices equals more management and security tools—on average 11 to 15 per business!—which quickly becomes unsustainable. Instead, consider the benefits of an end-to-end IT lifecycle management solution that can withstand challenges related to supply chain disruptions, product acquisition, asset and license tracking, and even product decommissioning and disposal.

Tune into this webinar to discover how end-to-end lifecycle services are a boon for today’s distributed workforces. George Ganas from Zones and ESG’s Senior Analyst Gabe Knuth share their thoughts and expertise on this subject matter.

Hybrid cloud strategies is a direction modern organizations are leveraging. Providing distributed cloud strategies is used to optimized business output. But movement from on-prem, to the private cloud to public cloud and beyond is becoming normal operations. In fact, according to Enterprise Strategy Group's research, 42% use at least four cloud service provides, which is not surprising given the importance of a distributed or multi-cloud approach in cloud-native strategies. IT decision makers and application developers should therefore make it a priority to put in place a unified architecture that can support these hybrid deployment models. Those organizations unable to capitalize on these strategies are often at a disadvantage competitively, strategically and organizationally.

Maximizing Business Results with Modernized Cloud Strategies

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Hybrid Cloud

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Cloud

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Public Cloud

Cloud Analytics

Cloud Strategy

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Maximizing Business Results with Modernized Cloud Strategies

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