Cloud Economics: Enabling Efficient & Secure Cloud Infrastructure

Every IT organisation is under pressure to deliver services as efficiently as possible, utilising infrastructure and services that may have a significant impact on the financial position and results of the organisation

Historically, cloud technology has made reference to the potential benefits of transferring costs from the balance sheet (capex) to the income statement (opex). However, an unintended consequence has been that few, if any, cloud related costs could be capitalised. This may not be the desired outcome for all organisations and the capitalisation of certain types of cloud technology maybe preferred, or even required by accounting standards. This session explores this area and what key considerations can be given to the capitalisation of cloud.

Interview in partnership with BrightTALK, The Stack and Cloud Industry Forum
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In this interview John Abel, the Head of Technology and Cloud for UK, Ireland and Israel at Oracle, is discussing the latest innovations in the cloud and how these impact the modern business environment.

Among topics discussed:

- Cloud in 2020
- Extreme innovations in the cloud
- Challenges with cloud adoption today
- Legacy organisations and digital transformation in the cloud
- "What does lobsters have to do with innovation"
- Top 3 pieces of advice for aspiring technology leaders

About the Speaker:
John Abel has worked with Oracle for over 20 years and during this time he has worked in Support, Applications, Technology and Consulting.

More recently John has been in Oracle Systems for four years. John's main focus now is Engineered Systems and Oracle Database Cloud (Database as a Service) across Europe, Middle East and Africa and he often uses his prior experience to explain all aspects of technology to customers. In his presentations, John relates to actual customer experience and provides real world answers to real world problems. John is also a successful Oracle Press Author and using his experience of over 300+ customer engagements has produced publications explaining the Oracle Technology and Applications.

Interview in partnership with BrightTALK, The Stack and Cloud Industry Forum
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In this interview, Sandra Bell, Head of BC & ISDG Consulting (Europe), Sungard, will share with us how tech innovations impact the moderb BCDR strategies.

Topics up for discussion:

- Innovations in the cloud and BCDR
- Critical things to know when creating a BCDR strategy
- Latest trends in disaster recovery
- Business continuity and digital transformation
- Technology recovery solutions and local resilience strategies
- And others

About the Speaker:
Sandra is a seasoned risk and business continuity professional with over 25 years’ experience of the design and management of strategic, business friendly risk, continuity and security solutions in public and private sectors. Experience ranges from: the management of risk and the protection of data within the UK’s main business process outsourcer to the financial and government sectors; to the protection of the largest part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure.

Today's IT is struggling with trying to keep the lights on for sometimes 100s or 1000s of applications built on legacy architectures while also attempting to turn on a dime in an era when business expects "just in time" IT. What strategies can you employ to help bridge the gap from yesterday to today and tomorrow? Where do you need to look for change (technologies, service providers, organizational) and what is possible through that change? Finally, what assumptions about what's possible for you to have to break through with yourself, your management and your customers?

What does it mean to achieve true agility, visibility, and security in your cloud and DevOps environment?

With Agility enable successful cloud deployments to meet the demands of scale.
With visibility drive reducing MTBF(mean-time-between-failures) and MTTR (mean-time-to-resolve).
With security ensure your Cloud environments are secure.

Join Syamla Bandla, VP of Global Cloud Operations and DevOps at Qualys and recipient of the Top Women in Cloud Award 2016, for a technical deep-dive into cloud applications and operations in the 21st century.

About the presenter:

Syamla has over 18 years building, scaling and transforming high-performance operations and engineering teams in the US, Europe and Asia. She has taken multiple organizations through various phases of organization building and transformation, transformed technology organizations from the ground up and taken multiple Cloud and SaaS products to market.

At RMS, Syamla was responsible for hybrid cloud engineering and operations, platform services, devops, and database operations & engineering, operational intelligence, monitoring and service Level management functions for all client facing cloud based products and services.

Prior to RMS, she was Head of SaaS Production Engineering and Operations team at Dell. Responsible for end to end service delivery of SaaS Products to production and managed Global Production Engineering and Operations teams across Europe, Asia and North America.

Syamla came to Dell as part of the start-up acquisition of “Everdream Corp” which built a Systems Management SaaS product. After the acquisition her responsibilities grew to integrating and building Global Production Engineering and Operations teams for four additional SaaS products.

Syamla Joined Dell from Fidelity Investments in Boston where she worked as Lead Network Engineer. In that role, she supported the critical infrastructure and network for mission critical trading floor applications and services.

The application lifecycle is fundamentally changing at a greater rate and amplitude. Accordingly, cloud services are integral to the application architecture and implementation. A key challenge to overcome is how to monitor with discipline these applications that are driving disruptive innovation in their respective industries.

In this session, we will discuss how to monitor cloud applications with discipline in order to ensure seamless application integration and delivery.
- What defines successful cloud applications?
- How do I apply a foundational set of skills like monitoring as a discipline to guarantee successful cloud outcomes?

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds with over 20 years of IT experience specializing in virtualization and cloud management. He is a US Patent holder, VMware vExpert™, Cisco® Champion, and active contributing thought leader within the virtualization community.

Cloud adoption is booming, with the major providers likely to top $100 billion in revenue by 2020. As enterprise IT organizations place a larger proportion of their application portfolios in cloud environments, they face a choice: manage those applications with the native tools offered by the cloud providers, or use third-party tools. This presentation examines the tradeoffs IT organizations face when deciding on which approach to use, along with the pros and cons of each approach. Specific topics addressed include:

- Technical approaches to managing cloud-based applications
- Tradeoffs in using cloud provider or third-party management solutions
- The challenge of innovation: managing applications that use higher-level cloud services
- How business value changes the cloud management decision
- The unaddressed cloud management challenge: economics

The webinar presenter has worked in cloud computing for over a decade, including at two cloud management software companies. He was also named by Wired.com as one of the ten most influential persons in cloud computing. Be sure to attend this webinar to learn from his experiences — good and bad — in this field!

Continuous Testing enables delivery of applications with greater speed and agility, without compromising quality. However, this places a demand on the application team to ensure complete coverage of the test cases, multiplied by the clients and devices that most accurately represent our users. The answer lies in the public cloud, but this isn’t without risks and complexity.

In this webinar, HPE will discuss the benefits and issues teams encounter when building a Continuous Testing pipeline using a public or private cloud infrastructure, and how to ensure the highest application quality, at the speed of your business.

In this webinar we will explore:

What tests to run and when
Environment coverage
Optimizing your execution costs
Exploratory testing to fill the gaps

BrightTALK caught up with vArmour's Chief Strategist, Mark Weatherford for an in-depth conversation on the current state of information security, today's threatscape and a discussion on the cyber industry.

Topics up for discussion:

- The rise of Ransomware and where companies are more vulnerable
- DDoS and why it's still a key threat to businesses
- The increased vulnerability of the IoT
- Challenges for Donald Trump and his new cyber team
- How to boost equality and diversity in the information security industry
- How cloud and virtualization are changing the security game

About the Speaker:
Mark Weatherford is Chief Cybersecurity Strategist at vArmour, the data center and cloud security company. He was formerly a Principal at the Chertoff Group, was Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity at DHS, was Chief Security Officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and was the CISO for the states of California and Colorado. He also served as a cryptologic officer in the US Navy. Weatherford is a Director on the Boards of Coalfire, the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security (CCHS) at the George Washington University, and the National Cybersecurity Center (NCC) in Colorado Springs. He is also on the Advisory Board at both Cylance and AlertEnterprise.

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) across different environments. However, what do these approaches mean for a hyperconverged storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Find out in this live SNIA-ESF webcast where expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, will move beyond the hype to discuss:

· What are the storage considerations for CI, CIB and HCI
· Fast applications and fast servers need fast server storage I/O
· Networking and server storage I/O considerations
· How to avoid aggravation-causing aggregation (bottlenecks)
· Aggregated vs. disaggregated vs. hybrid converged
· Planning, comparing, benchmarking and decision-making
· Data protection, management and east-west I/O traffic
· Application and server I/O north-south traffic

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=613

The organisational impact of “cloud” adoption (in all its guises), as well as other modern enterprise technologies, is a topic of relevance to IT and business leaders in all industry sectors.
The much vaunted shift to "everything-as-a-service" will have major implications not only on the tasks and services that IT departments traditionally perform, but the skills required in the organisation and the nature of the relationship that “IT” has with the “business”. Shadow IT is now a fact of life in most organisations. Business customers expect IT to take more of a leadership role in defining and enabling business strategy.
Or will it? Is it? Do they?
Join our panel of CxOs sharing real world experience as they debate the key factors impacting the performance of IT and how it evolves to meet the challenges
Panellists:
Mark Dermody, IT Director Costa Coffee
Nick Skelsey - IT Director Europe, Harding Retail (a member of Flemingo Duty Free)
Rob Pritchard - ex-CIO Britvic and visiting professor at Birmingham City University (moderator)
Nick Good - Director of Performance & Metrics, Office of the CIO Liberty Global/Virgin Media

The demand for digital data preservation has increased drastically in recent years. Maintaining a large amount of data for long periods of time (months, years, decades, or even forever) becomes even more important given government regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, OSHA, and many others that define specific preservation periods for critical records.

While the move from paper to digital information over the past decades has greatly improved information access, it complicates information preservation. This is due to many factors including digital format changes, media obsolescence, media failure, and loss of contextual metadata. The Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) was created by SNIA to facilitate long-term data storage and preservation. SIRF can be used with disk, tape, and cloud based storage containers, and is extensible to any new storage technologies. It provides an effective and efficient way to preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape.
Join this webcast to learn:
•Key challenges of long-term data retention
•How the SIRF format works and its key elements
•How SIRF supports different storage containers - disks, tapes, CDMI and the cloud
•Availability of Open SIRF

SNIA experts that developed the SIRF standard will be on hand to answer your questions.

In our first web event in this series, we presented the next generation of hybrid cloud management platform from HPE. Join our second web event for a more in-depth look into the primary design use case: hybrid and multi-cloud management. Learn about the advantages that Hybrid Cloud Management can provide to you and your organization:
Freedom to choose any cloud
Cloud agnostic service designs
Native container support
Provide master-level control over other clouds and orchestrator

HPE continues to refine and strengthen the capabilities of their cloud management platform with their newest software generation, Hybrid Cloud Management (HCM). HCM brings together hybrid and multi-cloud management, world class orchestration, application release automation, cloud compliance and an intelligent cloud service portal. Join us for this web event to find out how the HPE Hybrid Cloud Management platform can help you accelerate operations responsiveness and achieve cloud freedom.

Join Spacebelt and the Cloud Constellation Corporation for a technical deep-dive into connecting your cloud storage and telecommunications networks within your data center.

The Space-Based data center infrastructure is comprised of interconnected satellites, forming an exclusive cloud storage network ring to serve enterprises and governments everywhere. This is what the data center of the future looks like, and it includes an autonomous global telecom backbone, fast delivery of data stored in-orbit to anywhere on the planet, ultra secure point-to-point connectivity, and more.

With the every increasing influx of data and big data, cloud storage models and data centers need to continue to shift and adapt to these demands. Learn about the latest and greatest data center connectivity solutions and technologies on the market today.

Multi-Cloud Service Orchestration is a new challenge which Enterprises need to deal with. It is especially difficult for the various Enterprise IT organisational units to stay in control when their business units all use different Cloud portals and credentials and services from different public, private & hybrid clouds. How do they stay in control and support the various exploding landscapes? The T-Systems’ Cloud Integration Center (CIC) was designed to address this challenge, not just for initial orchestration, but also during the lifecycle of the services. Attend this session to hear some of the important considerations and solutions.