Cloud Computing: Best Practices for Public, Private or No Clouds At All

A recent survey conducted by Ensono, in partnership with the Cloud Industry Forum, showed that 89% of respondents believed that legacy technology was a barrier to effective digital transformation. Given that many organisations operate a complex technology landscape often with elements in different locations, and with core components that are regarded as ‘legacy but critical’, there needs to be a clear and simple approach to overcoming these obstacles.

Breaking down the barriers requires effective change in people, process and technology to attain a viable level velocity that will enable transformation without being held back by perceptions of legacy issues.

Examining these issues, this webinar will provide insight and thought provoking approaches for organisations seeking to transform their operations against this backdrop.

The “Great Storage Debates” webcast series continues, this time on FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER. Like past “Great Storage Debates,” the goal of this presentation is not to have a winner emerge, but rather provide vendor-neutral education on the capabilities and use cases of these technologies so that attendees can become more informed and make educated decisions.

One of the features of modern data centers is the ubiquitous use of Ethernet. Although many data centers run multiple separate networks (Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC)), these parallel infrastructures require separate switches, network adapters, management utilities and staff, which may not be cost effective.

Multiple options for Ethernet-based SANs enable network convergence, including FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) which allows FC protocols over Ethernet and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) for transport of SCSI commands over TCP/IP-Ethernet networks. There are also new Ethernet technologies that reduce the amount of CPU overhead in transferring data from server to client by using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which is leveraged by iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) to avoid unnecessary data copying.

That leads to several questions about FCoE, iSCSI and iSER:

•If we can run various network storage protocols over Ethernet, what
differentiates them?
•What are the advantages and disadvantages of FCoE, iSCSI and iSER?
•How are they structured?
•What software and hardware do they require?
•How are they implemented, configured and managed?
•Do they perform differently?
•What do you need to do to take advantage of them in the data center?
•What are the best use cases for each?

Join our SNIA experts as they answer all these questions and more on the next Great Storage Debate.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog from our presenters http://bit.ly/2NyJKUM

FICON (Fibre Channel Connection) is an upper-level protocol supported by mainframe servers and attached enterprise-class storage controllers that utilize Fibre Channel as the underlying transport. Mainframes are built to provide a robust and resilient IT infrastructure, and FICON is a key element of their ability to meet the increasing demands placed on reliable and efficient access to data. What are some of the key objectives and benefits of the FICON protocol? And what are the characteristics that make FICON relevant in today’s data centers for mission-critical workloads?

Join us in this live FCIA webcast where you’ll learn:

• Basic mainframe I/O terminology
• The characteristics of mainframe I/O and FICON architecture
• Key features and benefits of FICON

At most organizations, conference rooms are less than perfect--and that affects the productivity of any meeting. Inconsistency is the cornerstone of meeting room space, whether it's the power outlet locations, wired or wireless connectivity, brand of digital whiteboard, or video conferencing capabilities. That's why many companies are investing in "Conference Room of the Future" initiatives.

Nemertes recently conducted research among 600+ global organizations, and this webinar will focus on best practices.

It will address the following:
• What technologies are crucial to effective meetings?
• Who should run the meeting-room overhauls for the most success --IT or facilities?
• What are the differences between smaller, huddle rooms and large conference rooms, in terms of user expectations?
• How do advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and Internet of Things, play a role in meeting rooms?
• What should IT leaders look for in management and monitoring tools?

We look forward to sharing this information with you and answering your questions!

Join this 10 minute live Q&A with Splunk cloud migration experts as they discuss how organisations are cutting through the fog to gain visibility into their cloud environments for monitoring usage, security, compliance and keeping control of costs.

High visibility, low pressure.

Join this live panel discussion with experts from Splunk and AWS Marketplace to learn the latest trends and best practices for better cloud monitoring.

Tune into this interactive Q&A session to hear from Cloud and Storage experts on:

- How to ensure adherence to security and compliance standards
- How to manage AWS costs
- The benefits of analytics and visibility for your AWS workloads
- Why moving mission-critical workloads to AWS improves agility
- The latest updates from Splunk and AWS Marketplace on industry trends

This session will be broadcast LIVE straight from the AWS Summit in London.

Moderator: Simon Ratcliffe, Principal Consultant, Ensono & Cloud Industry Forum Chair
Panelists: James Hodge, AVP Field Technology, Splunk, Andrew Bird, Chief Digital Officer, Oryzus Consulting, and Benjamin Andrew, Global Lead - Security & Network Infrastructure, AWS Marketplace

Join this live panel discussion with experts from NetApp to learn the latest trends, technologies and future predictions for hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Tune into this interactive Q&A session to hear from Cloud, MSP and Infrastructure experts on:

- The future of data services for hybrid cloud platforms
- How to modernize your IT architecture
- Why a one-size-fits-all-approach doesn't work for hybrid cloud platforms
- Where managed hosting and managed services fit into your cloud strategy
- The latest trends in multi-cloud and what it means for enterprise applications

Moderator: Anthony Heaton, Director of Growth Sales, BrightTALK
Panelists: Martin Warren, Cloud Solutions Marketing Manager, NetApp, Chris Priest, Senior Consultant, Amido and Chris Harvey, Lead Architect, Scality

Without a solid collaboration strategy, organizations are very unlikely to succeed at digital transformation initiatives, particularly those that involve improved customer experience. The "customer" may be internal or external to the company.

This webinar reviews key data and real-world scenarios that show why collaboration tools enable customer experience improvements.

We will address the following:

• What measurable benefits do collaboration tools bring to CX?
• How can IT and business teams use CX initiatives to help secure budget for collaboration projects?
• What does management need to change--immediately--to help propel better collaboration and improved CX?
• How do collaboration initiatives integrate with CX in the contact center?
• How can you benefit from emerging AI integrations in both collaboration and contact-center tools?

We look forward to sharing this information with you!

Team collaboration apps like Slack, Spark, Glip, and Microsoft Teams are taking the enterprise market by storm. Given the more than 20 apps now on the market, where do IT leaders begin?

In this webinar series, we'll provide insight and guidance based on Nemertes' 2018 Unified Communications and Collaboration Research Study, answering the following questions:

• What is the state of team collaboration adoption?
• What are the drivers and business cases?
• How do customers rate their vendors?
• Will team collaboration replace or augment existing UC apps?
• What are the pros and cons of a single vendor versus multi-vendor approach?
• How do I integrate team collaboration into business apps and workflows?
• How do I address security, governance, and compliance?
• How are vendors differentiating themselves?
• What are the on-premises alternatives if cloud is not an option?

Attendees will gain the information they need to make better decisions as they build and deploy their own team collaboration strategy.

We look forward to sharing this information with you!

The AR Cloud

You won’t want to miss the opportunity to hear leading data storage experts provide their insights on prominent technologies that are shaping the market. With the exponential rise in demand for high capacity and secured storage systems, it’s critical to understand the key factors influencing adoption and where the highest growth is expected. From SSDs and HDDs to storage interfaces and NAND devices, get the latest information you need to shape key strategic directions and remain competitive.

Have you wondered which solution--on-premise, cloud, or hybrid—is the right Unified Communications architecture for your organization? Would you like to know which provider costs the most—and least?
Nemertes has the answer!
In this first episode of our five-part series on Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC), Robin Gareiss, Nemertes President and Founder, will present findings from our real-world research on UCC costs—based on the cost data from our 2018-19 Unified Communications and Collaboration Research study.
She also will introduce The Nemertes UC Cost Analysis Tool, our on-line, interactive, customizable tool that allows you to cost-compare solutions and providers. With this tool you’ll find out which architecture, and which provider, are the best fit for your organization.
This episode will take an in-depth look at UC Total Cost of Ownership and will cover:
• How to use Nemertes’ Online Cost Analysis Tool to get the data you need to make the best decisions
• How operational, implementation, and capital costs vary with on-prem, cloud, and hybrid deployments
• The Nemertes True Cost of Operations™ of key collaboration technologies including telephony, meetings, team collaboration, and more
• Which providers offer the lowest costs and best value, based on cost data and provider ratings from IT leaders across all industries
• What you’ll save on operational costs by investing in management and monitoring tools

We look forward to sharing all this information with you and to answering as many of your questions as possible!

DevOps and microservices architectures are said to deliver project nirvana, promising faster time to market and higher reliability. The reality, however, is quite different. While this promise is often fulfilled in greenfield projects, in real-life scenarios with existing legacy/monolithic applications, these benefits are much more difficult to realize.

During this webinar we’ll discuss:

- Approaches to modernizing monolithic legacy applications that leverage the benefits of microservices-based containerized architectures;
- Migration strategies, and organizational and technical considerations when refactoring applications;
- A reference architecture for an application delivery platform and factors you need to consider when selecting major platform components, including the microservices framework, container management platform, and cloud native storage.

It is no secret that containers have entered mainstream and are here to stay. Every IT organization is exploring the use of containers. It is easy to make the case for using containers for new applications, especially the ones designed with a microservices architecture.

The benefits of containerizing microservices applications are immediate and well understood. But what about the hundreds or sometimes thousands of applications that enterprise IT teams are already supporting. Shouldn’t they get some ‘container’ love? Can ‘containerizing’ these applications ‘modernize’ them, extending their useful life? If your applications are running fine, does it even make sense to bother containerizing them all?

In this webinar, we answer these questions and discuss a simple framework to decide if you will benefit by containerizing your applications. For organizations interested in adopting containers, we will look at how they can successfully deliver a container-as-a-service to operate and manage these containerized applications.

About the presenter:

Ritesh Patel is a co-founder and VP, Products at Nirmata, a cloud-native application management platform build on Kubernetes. Ritesh has around 15 years of enterprise software development experience and has led software development teams. Prior to Nirmata, Ritesh was responsible for private cloud strategy and business development at Brocade where he led various OpenStack related initiatives and created a partner ecosystem. Ritesh has also held key technical positions at Trapeze Networks, Nortel and Motorola. Ritesh holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and MS from Michigan State University.

More and more businesses are moving away from monolithic applications towards distributed applications and microservices in search of the many benefits to be reaped from this architecture, but how many of these benefits can we actually achieve without a continuous integration and deployment platform? How do we deploy these small, frequent changes in a scalable way? The only way we can do this is to adopt a CI/CD infrastructure that is optimized for building microservices.

Key Takeaways:
- Dynamically scale your build agents.
- Model dynamic environments using multi-stage Docker builds.
- Develop in the exact same environment as you build.
- Version your software-defined build environment alongside your code.

About the presenter:
Mandy Hubbard has almost 20 years of professional QA experience, most of which has been spent in fast-paced startup environments driving product quality. She is passionate about ensuring quality through process improvements, test automation, following CI/CD best practices and all things DevOps. She is currently a Software Engineer/QA Architect at CS Disco, an innovative startup delivering a unique, cloud-based machine learning platform for eDiscovery.

Join this live webcam panel moderated by Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor and Founding Partner at Kumulus Technologies, to discuss the state of containers and microservices in the enterprise, and answer the following questions:

Are containers and container managers like Kubernetes ready to deal with state, and state based services to support Enterprise workloads?
Is the security model of the Docker container revolution enough for Enterprise applications?
What is needed from a management domain to support Enterprise operations of a Container enabled Enterprise?
Is the Hybrid model for container management mature enough to support Enterprises approach to the container cloud model?
What is still missing in the container ecosystem in order to support Enterprise cloud transition?

Robert will be joined by the following expert panelists:

- Tarak Modi, President & CTO, TekNirvana
- Mandy Hubbard, Software Engineer/QA Architect, CSDisco

Brought to you by the Vivit Automation & Cloud Builders Special Interest (SIG) Group.

Attend this webinar to receive a live demonstration of public cloud service brokering, aggregation and governance using the Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management solution. HCM allows IT to easily aggregate public cloud resources into an end-user catalog, while providing governance and analytics to ensure business unit consumption is visible and within budget. In addition, learn how improved control of public cloud spending can help you start building a strong business case for cloud management.

Cloud Aggregation & Brokering
- Cloud service aggregation to quickly aggregate hybrid cloud services and publish offerings in catalog
- Self-service web portal access to catalog services for end users to consume services

Hybrid Cloud Governance
- Get visibility into IT cloud costs with show-back reporting for LOBs/organizations
- Policy-based budget quota management to proactively track cloud costs and notify on quota overages

Using the microservice architectural paradigm allows you to develop a single application as a set of loosely coupled, collaborating services. Each service implements a set of narrowly related functions and communicates with lightweight mechanisms, such as a HTTP resource API.

Microservices are relatively small and easier for a developer to understand. They provide better architecture for large applications and better isolation for scalability and damage control. However, they contain more moving parts and are harder to test.

An API gateway provides a single, unified API entry point across one or more internal APIs. It adds an additional layer of protection to your microservices by providing protection from attack vectors.

It also enables support for mixing communication protocols and decreases microservice complexity by providing authorization using API tokens, access control enforcement, and rate limiting.

In this session the followings topics will be covered:
- What are microservices
- What are the pros and cons of using microservices
- What are API gateways
- What problems API gateways are solving
- How containers fit into microservice architecture paradigm
- How to orchestrate and configure microservices and API gateways easily

The user/developer stories for using Kubernetes overlap with many of the user/developer stories for both Cloud Foundry (applications running in containers) and BOSH (running declarative production systems).

Join Dr. Nic Williams, CEO, Stark & Wayne, for this session will be a beginner's guide to Kubernetes through the eyes of an existing Cloud Foundry app developer and BOSH operator.

Dr. Nic Williams is the author of the free online books Ultimate Guide to BOSH and Concourse Tutorial.