Serious Business Belongs in the Cloud

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. Decisions surrounding what technologies to use is one, but they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. The storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in weeks, days or hours, but in minutes.

In part one of this three part series, we covered the high level aspects of Kubernetes. This presentation will discuss key capabilities IT vendors are creating based on open source technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes to build self-service infrastructure to support hybrid multi-cloud deployments.We’ll cover:

•Persistent storage and how to specify it
•Ensuring application portability between Private and Public Clouds
•Building a self-service infrastructure (Helm, Operators)
•Selecting Block, File, Object (Traditional Storage, SDS)

Real-world digital workloads often behave very differently from what might be expected. The equipment used in a computing system may function differently than anticipated. Unknown quirks in complicated software and operations running alongside the workload may be doing more or less than the user initially supposed. To truly understand what is happening, the right approach is to test and monitor the systems’ behaviors as real code is executed. By using measured data designers, vendors and service personnel can pinpoint the actual limits and bottlenecks that a particular workload is experiencing. Join the SNIA Solid State Storage Special Interest Group to learn how to be a part of the real-world workload revolution

Collaboration apps like Cisco Webex Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral Glip, and Slack are rapidly taking over the workplace, enabling groups to communicate in context and weave together workflows and data.
• But how to do organizations successfully adopt team collaboration?
• How do they integrate it into their existing application and collaboration environment while meeting governance, security, and compliance requirements?
• And how do they drive user awareness and adoption?
In this webinar we’ll look at the trends around team collaboration and the characteristics of successful deployments and provide a roadmap that IT leaders should follow to measurable business benefits.

Swordfish School: Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ Features and Profiles
Ready to ride the wave to what’s next in storage management? As a part of an ongoing series of educational materials to help speed your SNIA Swordfish™ implementation in this Swordfish School webcast, Storage standards expert Richelle Ahlvers (Broadcom Inc.) will provide an introduction to the Features and Profiles concepts, describe how they work together, and talk about how to use both Features and Profiles when implementing Swordfish.
Features are used by implementations to advertise to clients what functionality they are able to support. Profiles are detailed descriptions that describe down to the individual property level what functionality is required for implementations to advertise Features. The Profiles are used for in-depth analysis during development, making it easy for clients to determine which Features to require for different configurations. They are also used to determine certification / conformance requirements.

About SNIA Swordfish™
Designed with IT administrators and DevOps engineers in mind to provide simplified and scalable storage management for data center environments, SNIA Swordfish™ is a standard that defines the management of data storage and services as an extension to the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Redfish application programming interface specification. Unlike proprietary interfaces, Swordfish is open and easy-to-adopt with broad industry support.
Your one stop shop for everything SNIA Swordfish is https://www.snia.org/swordfish.

Enterprises have embraced cloud computing to unlock the opportunity offered by digital transformation. The cloud’s flexibility and agility enable enterprises to grow their business without borders and ensure productivity and efficiency.

While enterprise applications continue to migrate to the cloud, the necessary change in the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked. The hub-and-spoke WAN architecture that served the needs of the enterprise when applications were delivered from the datacenter, must evolve to serve the needs of the era of cloud applications. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is the WAN's response to this paradigm shift in application traffic to the cloud.

While SD-WAN has emerged as a key enabler of secure and seamless direct cloud application access with the benefits of transport independence, better security and path selection, it has brought into focus the importance of the transport underlay and the technology investment — both past and future — that an enterprise needs to consider before adopting SD-WAN.

This webinar spotlights two critical success factors for driving mainstream enterprise adoption of SD-WAN:

*Predictable and robust Internet connectivity
*Investment protection (of installed legacy network equipment or in new technology) as the WAN evolves to support applications delivered from the cloud.

Join us at this webinar as we make sense of SD-WAN adoption for your company.

Over the last few years, a major shift has occurred in the Quality Assurance (QA) and Software Testing Management space. Organizations are adopting smart test automation, but continue to find the need for traditional PMO-level reporting offered by tools like Micro Focus ALM and Quality Center. Often, this results in a tool mismatch that negatively impacts the ability to report in real-time across all phases of manual and automated testing.

Smart test automation is no longer a “nice to have” but rather a foundational aspect of the testing process, and this is impacting the toolchain. Organizations are adding new test management tools like Selenium, Tricentis Tosca and others to their suite to better align with their Agile and test automation efforts. Global QA Directors are recognizing a multi-vendor and multi-tool approach to software quality assurance with commercial and open-source tools yields the best results.

With test planning, design, execution, and reporting now split across multiple tools, organizations have lost their visibility into key QA metrics for measuring manual vs. automated test execution effectiveness, test automation progress, automated testing execution progress, and defect remediation for all phases of the software testing lifecycle.

Join Senior Value Stream Architect, Matt Angerer, to learn how Tasktop can help you:

•Modernize test management by adding new, specialized tools for test automation
•Improve collaboration between QA teams working in their preferred tools of choice
•Eliminate the laborious effort of manual synchronization and report generation
•Centralize test data from automated and manual tests spanning multiple tools and instances for real-time reporting

Over the last few years, a major shift has occurred in the Quality Assurance (QA) and Software Testing Management space. Organizations are adopting smart test automation, but continue to find the need for traditional PMO-level reporting offered by tools like Micro Focus ALM and Quality Center. Often, this results in a tool mismatch that negatively impacts the ability to report in real-time across all phases of manual and automated testing.

Smart test automation is no longer a “nice to have” but rather a foundational aspect of the testing process, and this is impacting the toolchain. Organizations are adding new test management tools like Selenium, Tricentis Tosca and others to their suite to better align with their Agile and test automation efforts. Global QA Directors are recognizing a multi-vendor and multi-tool approach to software quality assurance with commercial and open-source tools yields the best results.

With test planning, design, execution, and reporting now split across multiple tools, organizations have lost their visibility into key QA metrics for measuring manual vs. automated test execution effectiveness, test automation progress, automated testing execution progress, and defect remediation for all phases of the software testing lifecycle.

Join Senior Value Stream Architect, Tina Dankwart, to learn how Tasktop can help you:

•Modernize test management by adding new, specialized tools for test automation
•Improve collaboration between QA teams working in their preferred tools of choice
•Eliminate the laborious effort of manual synchronization and report generation
•Centralize test data from automated and manual tests spanning multiple tools and instances for real-time reporting

For a long time, the architecture and best practices of storage networks have been relatively well-understood. Recently, however, advanced capabilities have been added to storage that could have broader impacts on networks than we think.

The three main storage network transports - Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and InfiniBand – all have mechanisms to handle increased traffic, but they are not all affected or implemented the same way. For instance, placing a protocol such as NVMe over Fabrics can mean very different things when looking at one networking method in comparison to another.

Unfortunately, many network administrators may not understand how different storage solutions place burdens upon their networks. As more storage traffic traverses the network, customers face the risk of congestion leading to higher-than-expected latencies and lower-than expected throughput. Watch this webinar to learn:

•Typical storage traffic patterns
•What is Incast, what is head of line blocking, what is congestion, what is a slow drain, and when do these become problems on a network?
•How Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand handle these effects
•The proper role of buffers in handling storage network traffic
•Potential new ways to handle increasing storage traffic loads on the network

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://bit.ly/323kyNj

Tomorrow's businesses need a simpler and more scalable way to increase the resiliency of global application infrastructure, without slowing innovation, today.

Join this interactive 1-2-1 discussion where EMEA Chief Technology Officer, Paul Farrington (CISSP, MBCS) will share how leading businesses are;

- Improving the level of security awareness and addressing the skills deficit
- Enabling developers to fix flaws and prevent new ones
- Prioritising and triaging the most exploitable flaws
- Automating application security
- Providing software development leaders with really useful security metrics
- Incentivising secure development as part of their culture

This session will show you how architects and developers are making smarter choices in designing secure software. You will also learn how to report success, and investment justification, to the board whilst setting realistic expectations throughout the software development lifecycle and not just at the destination.

Join this interactive 1-2-1 discussion where Field Chief Technology Officer, Nicolas Groh will share;

- Challenges businesses are facing today with regards to security and compliance in the cloud
- Improvements that can be made today to ransomware prevention, detection, and recovery
- Long-term security and compliance strategies
- Quantifiable outcomes businesses can expect to see with a unified system of records

Moderated by Paige Bidgood, EMEA Community Lead - IT Security & GRC, BrightTALK

Cloud security is a key challenge for today's data-driven businesses.

Join this interactive 1-2-1 discussion where Principal Security Analyst, Carl Leonard will share insights on;

- What are the top cyber threats and trends to look out for in 2019?
- Why are businesses continuing to suffer data breaches?
- How are businesses securing themselves as they embrace digital transformation?
- What is secure SD-WAN? Why is it increasingly important to businesses with distributed office locations?
- What are the most important security solutions for businesses wishing to safely adopt cloud services?

Moderated by Raef Meeuwisse, ISACA Expert Speaker and co-author of "How to Hack a Human: Cybersecurity for the Mind"

Effectively protecting critical data in the cloud is a key challenge for today's data-driven businesses.

Join this interactive 1-2-1 discussion where Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Dave Barnett will share insights on;

- Why and how today organisations are protecting data in the cloud.
- What are the main risks inherent in the adoption of cloud services?
- Where the key challenges are in protecting data in the Cloud?
- What to look for when selecting cloud security for your organisation

Moderated by Alex Hilton, Chief Executive, Cloud Industry Forum

The cloud strategy of today's enterprise spans across multiple clouds and hundreds of applications. Point security solutions no longer work, so enterprises are turning toward a more orchestrated approach to achieving security and compliance in the cloud.

Join cloud and security leaders in an interactive discussion to learn about:
- Key security and compliance challenges associated with a multi-cloud strategy
- Recommendations for managing and automating security across multiple clouds and applications
- The future of cloud
- Improving enterprise security in an ever-changing threat landscape

Panellists
James Hughes, Field CTO, Rubrik
Dave Barnett, Head of CASB, Forcepoint EMEA
Patrick Grillo, Senior Director - Security Solutions, Fortinet

Moderated by Alex Hilton, Chief Executive, Cloud Industry Forum