Mastering Virtualization & Cloud Management

IBM Institute for Business Value estimates that by 2021, 98 percent of companies plan to use multiple hybrid clouds. As such, there are many discussions about the benefits and challenges of going multi-cloud.

From managing cost to automating security and mitigating risk, businesses need to be made aware of best practices and solutions that make multi-cloud adoption and deployments as smooth and secure as possible.

Join this BrightTALK session as Melanie Turek, VP of Research at Frost and Sullivan, explores strategies and use cases with a panel of multi-cloud experts.

Panelists:
Jenny Fong, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Docker, Inc.
John DiMaria, Assurance Investigatory Fellow, Cloud Security Alliance

Cloud and Cybersecurity Series [Ep. 2]: Mastering Multicloud - Architectures, Organizations, Building Blocks

In 2019 the balance tipped, and for the first time the majority of enterprise IT workloads are running in the cloud, not in a data center.

Enterprise IT staff need to stop thinking of cloud solutions as islands of function and special cases and begin to think of pulling it all together into a cohesive multicloud. We'll lay out the major categories of tools and systems and how they fit together, and at the organizational structures and operational practices needed to support multicloud operations.

This webinar presents the highlights of Nemertes' in-depth research study of 335 organizations in 11 countries across a range of vertical industries. Later episodes will discuss cloud organizations and operational practices, and success metrics and best practices for cloud organizations.

The majority of organisations today are running their IT estate across multiple platforms including private clouds, on-premise data centres, software as a service, and public clouds. Whilst this flexibility can drive significant business benefit, there are a number of key areas of operations and governance that require a different approach. Many organisations have suffered from cost management challenges despite the claims of many cloud providers that their platform will create savings and so we will examine options for effective cost management that actually work – and the pitfalls to avoid!

Cloud itself has a well-established security pedigree but managing security and risk across multiple clouds adds a layer of complexity that can lead to issues and so we will explore some of the key risks in such an environment and suggest how these can also be mitigated.

The modern approach to delivering IT solutions for an enterprise starts with a hybrid cloud, security centric approach. Everything IT is being becoming software-defined, a.k.a. “IT-as-Code”. This requires enterprise security and ops teams to know how to connect together APIs, deploy cloud infrastructure, use automation tools, and adopt DevSecOps methodologies for delivering modern IT solutions to their stakeholders. Finding nirvana in the modern enterprise world requires this missing link: repeatable, secure IT-as-Code solution blueprints that can be agile, iterated on, and adapted to ongoing business and compliance requirements.

In this session you will learn how to build a secure IT solution blueprint using AWS and Azure cloud native templates (IaaS & PaaS) combined with Red Hat Ansible for configuration management (Legacy apps & SaaS), and how to tie into external APIs.

We will then discuss best practices for applying cloud security controls with every cloud service, automation task and API integration. We will discuss using open source security tools, e.g. Chef Inspec for automating compliance requirements and security remediation.

To wrap up the session, we will go over the entire lifecycle of solution delivery adding in to the blueprints, with cloud services and other API integrations connect everything together to show own to intelligently deliver end-to-end solution blueprints and how to manage the configuration of the state of the environment over time.

According to InfoWorld, 'Hybrid IT in the enterprise has emerged primarily as a response to DevOps.'

As such, it is no surprise that the traditional 'disruptive' DevOps practices need to be adapted for the enterprise. From an integrated approach to application life cycle management, to utilising the best parts of DevOps in the mainframe environment, the new modes of enterprise IT need to work with the legacy mainstays to deliver secure, fast and robust services.

Join our expert panel as they share how to inspire collaboration to harness the new era of Hybrid IT and Enterprise DevOps.

Speakers:
Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor, Founding Partner, Kumulus Technologies (moderator)
Brian Gracely, Director, Product Strategy, RedHat
Robert Von Mehren, Inside Systems Engineer, Veeam
Carl Holt, EMEA Pre Sales Manager, Kemp

Enterprise networking needs are shifting--cloud models and new applications are driving digital transformation, according to this newly released State of the WAN Report.

To better understand networking and application performance challenges, priorities, and plans, Aryaka conducts an annual State of the WAN survey administrated to almost 800 global IT and network practitioners. In this report they discovered that almost 50% have over 100 applications, and because of this increasing complexity, IT professionals are having a hard time provisioning, optimizing, and securing their Cloud and WAN deployments.

Join us for this panel discussion as we reveal findings from the third annual global survey and insights into the State of the WAN in 2019, including:

• The biggest challenges companies are facing with their WAN
• Features IT professionals are looking for in an SD-WAN solution
• Top Applications driving WAN transformation
• Insights into N.America, Europe and APAC trends

We will also be hosting a panel at 14:00 GMT for our European folks. Please visit,
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17572/365909?utm_source=AryakaEMEA

As we look ahead to 2020, join leading cloud storage, networking and backup experts as they share adoption, practice and deployment best practices.

From learning how cloud is changing networking, to ramping up your storage infrastructure and implementing best-in-class backup strategies, this panel will uncover all you need to know about next-gen cloud storage, networking and backup.

Moderator:
Simon Ratcliffe, Principal Consultant, Ensono

Panelists:
Laura Jordana, Technical Marketing Engineer, Nutanix
Kiran Sirupa, Director of Marketing, Anuta Networks
Mike Goulding, Sales Engineer, Virtuozzo

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep 3]: The Agent Experience - From Good to Great

Although organizations are busy adding self-service channels, and AI-enabled chatbots or virtual agents to their customer engagement strategies, there is no replacement for the human touch.

Successful companies are transforming the agent experience, delivering better coaching, more analytics, and improved compensation packages.

Learn how you can leverage AI and analytics to reduce contact center agent turnover rates--and ultimately improve the customer experience.

Although physical network infrastructure is not required to run workloads on public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), network connectivity designs and network services are still required for applications to operate reliably and securely. In this webinar, well explore the fundamental concepts that IT infrastructure experts and network engineers need to understand when building out connectivity solutions for the public cloud.

This webinar will dive into the concepts and features of virtual networks, sometimes referred to as virtual private clouds (VPCs), the foundational building block for most cloud services. Connectivity and routing solutions between virtual networks and back to traditional corporate networks will be discussed. Included in these scenarios will be an introduction to cloud-native services, such as security groups, network load balancers and logging and how these services compare against third party appliances and traditional firewalls.

Enterprise networking needs are shifting--cloud models and new applications are driving digital transformation, according to this newly released State of the WAN Report.

To better understand networking and application performance challenges, priorities, and plans, Aryaka conducts an annual State of the WAN survey administrated to almost 800 global IT and network practitioners. In this report they discovered that almost 50% have over 100 applications, and because of this increasing complexity, IT professionals are having a hard time provisioning, optimizing, and securing their Cloud and WAN deployments.

Join us for this panel discussion as we reveal findings from the third annual global survey and insights into the State of the WAN in 2019, including:

• The biggest challenges companies are facing with their WAN
• Features IT professionals are looking for in an SD-WAN solution
• Top Applications driving WAN transformation
• Insights into N.America, Europe and APAC trends

And so much more...

“Cloud” is a collective term for a large number of developments and possibilities. It is not an invention, but more of a “practical innovation,” combining several earlier inventions into something new and compelling.

While their motivations vary, businesses of all sizes, industries, and geographies are turning to cloud services.

According to Goldman Sachs, spending on cloud computing infrastructure and platforms will grow at a 30% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 through 2020 compared with 5% growth for overall enterprise IT, giving rise to the Cloud access security brokers(CASB) market in the process.

Cloud adoption is accelerating faster than previously anticipated, leading Forrester to recently revise its 2011 forecast of the public cloud market size upward by 20%.

Whether you’re looking at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the predictions are the same. Join this webinar hosted by Solution Architect Akeem Jagunna-Oriyomi to find out more!

The hyper-growth and hyper-sprawl of data requires cloud strategies that simplify management and optimize protection of the data and applications that power your business. In this session, you will hear about any.cloud and how they combine Data management software with IBM Cloud to provider Cloud data management, and data security solutions in the cloud:

- Simplify data protection and disaster recovery in your data center and in the cloud
- Enable long-term data retention using Cloud Object Storage integration
- Deepen the integration into enterprise workloads such as VMware, IBM Cloud, and Azure
- Enhance ransomware attack prevention and regulatory compliance

About any.cloud:
any.cloud is market leading in DR and data availability in the cloud. any.cloud offers its solutions globally in 60+ datacenters. any.cloud is ISO 27001 certified, and so are the datacenters.

Since 1998, any.cloud has been helping its customers increase their business and is committed to being the chosen partner, when it comes to cloud services. We have come a long way since then, constantly improving, refining and developing our products with new solutions to promote business.

The team at any.cloud work intensely on updating our services, because we care about your business as much as you do and we specialize in building expert services to maximize the potential of your business. We are always looking to the future and push the limits. We create a strong foundation for growth to support our partners. We do not stop until you are happy with the solution and we have solved your problem.

Cloud & Cybersecurity Series [Ep.1]: Success Metrics, Best Practices & More

What does it take for enterprise cybersecurity teams to "up their games" to the next level of cybersecurity? What does it mean to be a "successful" cybersecurity organization, and what technologies and practices does it take to become one?

This webinar presents the highlights of Nemertes' in-depth research study of 335 organizations in 11 countries across a range of vertical industries.

We separated the best from the rest, and took an in-depth look into what made the most successful organizations that way. Participants will come away with best practices, tools, technologies, and organizational structures that contribute to success. Most importantly, they'll learn how to measure cybersecurity success--and their progress towards it.

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.2]: Top 5 'Must-Haves' for Your Next-Generation Contact Center

Contact centers are changing--drastically and swiftly. If you're not keeping pace--or exceeding it--you'll be at a competitive disadvantage.

Learn what successful companies are doing with areas such as agent experience, interaction channels, and emerging technologies.

Based on Nemertes' brand new, detailed, Customer Experience research study with 518 organizations, this webinar will explain the five crucial items that must be on your priority list to ensure your contact center is positioned to deliver successful customer experiences.

Fibre Channel has long been known to be a very secure protocol for storage. Even so, there is no such thing as a “perfectly secure” technology, and for that reason it’s important to constantly update and protect against threats.

The sheer variety of environments in which Fibre Channel fabrics are deployed makes it very difficult to simply rely only on physical security. In fact, it’s possible to access different storage systems by different users, even when spanned over several sites. Fibre Channel enables security services to specifically address these concerns, and prevent misconfigurations or access to data by non-authorized people and machines.

This webcast is going to dive deep into the guts of security aspects of Fibre Channel, looking closely at the protocols used to implement security in a Fibre Channel fabric. In particular, we’re going to look at:

•The definitions of the protocols to authenticate Fibre Channel devices
•What are the different classes of threats, and what are the mechanisms to protect against them
•What are session keys and how to set them up
•How Fibre Channel negotiates these parameters to insure frame-by-frame integrity and confidentiality
•How Fibre Channel establishes and distributes policies across a fabric

Please join us to learn more about the technical considerations that Fibre Channel brings to the table to secure and protect your data and information.

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.1] AI Drives Measurable Success in Customer Engagement

Nearly 50% more companies are using or planning to use AI in their customer engagement initiatives.
Nemertes recently studied how 518 companies are using AI and analytics to improve their customer experiences. This webinar details:
• how these companies use AI
• what measurable improvements resulted.

Kubernetes is great for running stateless workloads, like web servers. It’ll run health checks, restart containers when they crash, and do all sorts of other wonderful things. So, what about stateful workloads?

This webcast will take a look at when it’s appropriate to run a stateful workload in cluster, or out. We’ll discuss the best options for running a workload like a database on the cloud, or in the cluster, and what’s needed to set that up.

We’ll cover:
•Secrets management
•Running a database on a VM and connecting it to Kubernetes as a service
•Running a database in Kubernetes using a `stateful set`
•Running a database in Kubernetes using an Operator
•Running a database on a cloud managed service

After you watch the webcast, check out our Kubernetes Links & Resources blog at http://bit.ly/KubeLinks

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit US Government Solutions Special Interest Group.

Objective: Learn how to leverage the Cloud for realistic Performance Testing.

Cloud Burst, a Micro Focus performance testing solution, is the only product on the market today that can automatically support your scalable performance testing needs in the Government FedRAMP Cloud environments.

See how your testing can be hosted in a Private Secure Gov Cloud environment to automatically execute performance or stress test completely within the Gov Cloud environments, or from various cloud regions around the world, simulating real user’s experience during the performance test.

Watch the live demo running in the FedRAMP Gov Cloud regions to see how easy, quickly and affordably you can plan, design and execute your application performance testing requirements.

This offering with flexible pricing, allows clients to leverage their investment in the Micro Focus ADM software solutions, increasing their ROI, while reducing risk and adding value to their organization’s internal and external users.

The SNIA EMEA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) will return to Tel Aviv in early February 2020.

SDC EMEA is organised by SNIA, the non-profit industry association responsible for data storage standards and education, and the conference is designed to provide an open and independent platform for technical education and knowledge sharing amongst the local storage development community.

SDC is built by developers – for developers.

This session will offer a preview of what is planned for the 2020 agenda ahead of the call for presentations and will also give potential sponsors the information they need to be able to budget for their participation in the event. If you have attended previously as a delegate, this is a great opportunity to learn more about how you can raise your profile as a speaker or get your company involved as a sponsor. There will be time allocated during the webcast to ask questions about the options available. Companies who have significant storage development teams will learn why this conference is valuable to the local technical community and why they should be directly engaged.