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

The role of the architect has changed dramatically in the past few years and is headed for even more change as the landscape of possible technology options is only going to
increase. Faced with a list of options that is increasing almost daily across a highly
competitive landscape, many architectural decisions have become an exercise in avoiding error rather than exploring possibility.

Whilst an acceptance of failure is becoming the norm in smaller development faced activities, architects must make big decisions that can affect the entire operation of an organisation. This webinar explores some ideas for architectural best practice and mechanisms for reducing risk whilst empowering architects to unleash some of the exciting new options available to them.

Digital Transformation is an over-used phrase and one that is often used to describe what is
essentially business transformation that is underpinned by technology. Does this mean that
these transformations are deeply vertical and need deep industry experience to be
successful? In this webinar we examine how organisations can learn from other industry
sectors and also from breaking the standard rules within their own industry.
In this webinar, listeners will be able to learn:
- How do we look across industries and learn from success in others?
- How do we escape from the ‘me too’ transformational activity and break away from trying to keep up and get in front?

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.

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

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
Dave Barnett, Head of CASB, Forcepoint EMEA
Patrick Grillo, Senior Director - Security Solutions, Fortinet
John Meakin, Group Chief Information Security Officer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)

Moderated by Alex Hilton, Chief Executive, Cloud Industry Forum

In the short period from 2014-2018, Ethernet equipment vendors have announced big increases in line speeds, shipping 25, 50, and 100 Gigabits-per -second (Gb/s) speeds and announcing 200/400 Gb/s. At the same time Fibre Channel vendors have launched 32GFC, 64GFC and 128GFC technology while InfiniBand has reached 200Gb/s (called HDR) speeds.

But who exactly is asking for these faster new networking speeds, and how will they use them? Are there servers, storage, and applications that can make good use of them? How are these new speeds achieved? Are new types of signaling, cables and transceivers required? How will changes in PCIe standards keep up? And do the faster speeds come with different distance limitations?

Watch this SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast to learn how these new speeds are achieved, where they are likely to be deployed for storage, and what infrastructure changes are needed to support them.

Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components.

We build effective systems in a cost-optimal way by using appropriate quantities of expensive and fast memory (DRAM for instance) to cache our cheaper and slower storage. But currently fast memory has no persistence at all; it’s only storage that provides the application the guarantee that storing, modifying or deleting data does exactly that.

Memory and storage differ in other ways. For example, we load from memory to registers on the CPU, perform operations there, and then store the results back to memory by using byte addresses. This load/store technology is different from storage, where we tend to move data back and fore between memory and storage in large blocks, by using an API (application programming interface).

New memory technologies are challenging these assumptions. They look like storage in that they’re persistent, if a lot faster than traditional disks or even Flash based SSDs, but we address them in bytes, as we do memory like DRAM, if more slowly. Persistent memory (PM) lies between storage and memory in latency, bandwidth and cost, while providing memory semantics and storage persistence. In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

•Traditional uses of storage and memory as a cache
•How can we build and use systems based on PM?
•What would a system with storage, persistent memory and DRAM look like?
•Do we need a new programming model to take advantage of PM?
•Interesting use cases for systems equipped with PM
•How we might take better advantage of this new technology

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes promises simplified management of cloud workloads at scale, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in a public cloud infrastructure, allowing effortless movement of workloads from cloud to cloud. By some reckonings, it is being deployed at a rate several times faster than virtualization.

In this presentation, we’ll introduce Kubernetes and present use cases that make clear where and why you would want to use it in your IT environment. We’ll also focus on the enterprise requirements of orchestration and containerization, and specifically on the storage aspects and best practices.

•What is Kubernetes? Why would you want to use it?
•How does Kubernetes help in a multi-cloud/private cloud environment?
•How does Kubernetes orchestrate & manage storage? Can Kubernetes use Docker?
•How do we provide persistence and data protection?
•Example use cases