Efficiency and Ecological Responsibility of Cloud Computing

As an IT Pro you are asked to do impossibly hard things daily by the business. Being the caretaker for the storage of your enterprise is a critical task, that you have to plan and maintain everyday. More importantly your storage needs are increasing every year. Microsoft Azure storage can help ease the burden and worry you have with your storage needs. Additionally Microsoft Azure can even help reduce your enterprise storage costs by almost 80%. Learning how to leverage Microsoft Azure Storage can help you take your enterprise to the next level.

Hybrid Cloud is all about augmenting your existing, on-premises datacenter with elastic capacity-on-demand securely provided by public and hosted clouds. However, managing Hybrid Clouds can be painful, as it often involves using separate management tools for each platform. Attend this session to learn about the key Hybrid Cloud scenarios that other organizations are implementing to manage across private, public and hosted clouds with a consistent management experience using System Center 2012 R2 and Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services.

At the end of this session, you will also receive a FREE eBook on Hybrid Cloud Management to help you get started in your own organization.

In the last 12 months, adoption of platform as a service (PaaS) has increased dramatically and it is now one of the fastest growing areas in the cloud ecosystem. We will explore why PaaS has suddenly become so relevant and irresistible to organizations as well as the opportunities and considerations associated with using PaaS from an application development and deployment perspective. This talk will outline the ways PaaS enhances the application lifecycle and explain how OutSystems Platform can supercharge application delivery teams - making it easy to create, deploy and manage enterprise mobile and web applications.

Legacy data center network architectures are typically static, inflexible and manually provisioned, making them unsuitable for the scale and agility required of a cloud business model. Emerging cloud delivery models incorporate automated service provisioning in a virtualized, multi-tenant environment to achieve scale and agility. Dynamic service chaining is a critical component in building an on-demand model for consumption of L4-L7 application network services. In this session we will cover how dynamic service chaining is integrated into the SDN and cloud orchestration platforms to deliver a highly available, secure and accelerated infrastructure.

The practice of securing the data center is changing almost as fast as the technology in them. Historically protection of data center assets – physical and virtual – has been siloed. Increased physical terrorism and cyber terrorism are forging a new thinking about how to protect data centers. The requirements for securing the data center are becoming holistic with physical and cyber security integrated into a single discipline.

So join Jerry L. Bowman, President of Square Mile Systems and Data Center industry veteran as he highlights ways to effectively deal with cyber security and discusses the 4 trends in Data Center security that could change everything:

- The New Cyber Security – the new expectations of cyber security, including new framework like the NIST Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity and other important standards and best practices from organizations like ISACA, ISO, TIA and BICSI.

- Public and Private Clouds – Public and private clouds bring new levels of risk as the emphasis on infrastructure security for data in motion becomes key. This trend is driving new levels of focus on the availability of data across a broader infrastructure.

- Accreditation – More and more data center professionals are looking for accreditation of their facilities and networks against standards and best practices. The future of accreditation against standards is discussed and the role of the security professional.

- Shadow IT – The most secure data center in the world isn’t going to provide any protection if IT services are sought by Shadow IT organizations. The increasing tolerance of BYOD (bring your own device) along with the use of often unapproved IT software and services could become the nemesis of cyber security.

In today's data centers, the need for flexibility and agility is undeniable. As businesses continue to grow and leverage technology to remain competitive, they require a new way of simplified IT. IT organizations can no longer deal with complex, cumbersome legacy infrastructure that can't keep at the pace of the business.

In this webinar, discover:
- What is hyper convergence
- The benefits of converged infrastructure
- Best practices and use cases for leveraging hyper converged architectures

In the 1970s and 1980s the Swiss watchmaking industry went almost extinct as Asian companies such as Seiko moved to factory mass manufacturing of the new, cheaper and more accurate quartz watch movement. The Swiss industry shrunk rapidly, most of the brands went under or were sold and had to find a new way to survive. The Swiss survived, at much smaller volume, by producing high cost mechanical watches which were expensively marketed as luxury items, a type of positional good (a good whose value is determined by its desirability to others) and creating an artificial scarcity.

We have a similar economic event happening in the data center market today. The design, construction and operation of a data center to the minimum TCO has become commoditised, suppliers and operators no longer have any “secret sauce” or knowledge that enables them to substantially outperform the market, at the same time cloud technologies are driving down the market price at a huge rate thanks to the uber operators such as Google and Amazon.

The questions this raises are;
1. Which of the current types of data center or equipment supplier will survive?

2. Will the whole market go to cloud services purchased by the hour and eliminate data center demand entirely?

3. Will the modular, factory built, data centers become the Quartz watch and virtually eliminate legacy custom design and ‘stick build’?

4. Are the modular vendors offering real TCO value for money or are they the new luxury brands selling only perceived value and marketing?

5. What happens to the value of existing data centers for enterprise owner operators and data center businesses?

A number of companies are helping to build the green Internet by committing to power their operations with 100 percent renewable energy. Find out who is doing it and how they are doing it, in this talk from Greenpeace’s, Head of Technology, Andrew Hatton

- Cloud Energy Snapshot
A quick look at the different energy sources powering the internet today across the globe

- Your Roadmap to a Green Internet
The IT sector has made substantial progress in driving innovation in data centre and server energy efficiency design in the past 5-plus years, yet there is more to do.

Here we look at the key ingredients for any company which wants to build their part of the internet with renewable energy.

- Your own online world: Green in Real Life or #Dirty
From social media to music, streaming video, we are increasingly moving much of our lives online. That means a lot of new data to store. But where is that databeing stored, which companies are storing it, and what kind of energy are they using?

- Green Internet leaders and best practice
Find out which companies have committed to a goal of powering data centres with 100 % renewable energy. Find out which organisations are providing the early signs of the promise and potential impact of a renewably powered internet.

Don't be caught in the trap of guessing about performance in the cloud. This webinar will cover a methodology of using your pre-migration performance baseline to determine if your cloud environment is performing at your expected levels. We will also explore cloud performance validation and IaaS performance assurance.

Frictionless access to information makes everyone think they can do this at home. But, in fact, deploying OpenStack on optimized hardware hardware presents a hatful of challenges that your infrastructure team might not have thought about.

In this session, we'll look at a range of challenges that can stop your project before it makes it to deployment. The session is divided into two topics that we’ll dive into:

(a) Introduction to scalability techniques: clouds from a hardware perspective.
Building a large cloud is more than just throwing hardware into a hall and lighting it up. Network, storage, compute and scaling strategies must be designed in from the beginning. In the current state of the art of OpenStack, some decisions are easy to unwind later on and some are impossible. This portion of the presentation will focus on describing the steps you need to execute to build a successful cloud and which decisions you can push off to later.

(b) The second section of the session will focus on strategies to simplify the optimized hardware experience. If you’re assembling racks on onsite, you need a plan to deal with everything from cabling and airflow to the NIC firmware and drivers. Each of these details can delay your project and run up costs. We’ll also look at the trend toward scalable rack-level units that are factory integrated and tested.

Attendees will also learn about some of the simple things that are obvious with enterprise hardware but can be challenging in any optimized hardware environment. Examples include power on/off, power monitoring, system health/event monitoring, remote console access.

You'll leave this session armed with practical knowledge about running OpenStack on Open Compute and other optimized hardware hardware.

85% of enterprises permit BYOD, but only 25-30% of them actually have policies and technology to manage these devices. What is your business doing to ensure that the content on that device stays secure, regardless of what device your employees are using? If you are considering moving to a BYOD strategy or are in the midst of doing so, join this webinar to learn how to develop and execute a BYOD plan in your company. We'll talk about major challenges from creating a BYOD strategy and best practices from ensuring that the content on your device stays secure with Box.

Learn why benchmarking your current network and server virtualization infrastructure is vital to your organizations long-term Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) success. Benchmarking will yield your IT organization the knowledge needed for solid planning, effective execution and post-migration performance validation.

The future of work sees changes to how employees work, how managers lead, and how organizations are structured. However, technology still remains the central nervous system of organizations and things like enables flexible work, collaboration, communication, and BYOD. In short, IT helps organizations be competitive. But how is IT changing in the context of new work behaviors and expectations, a multi-generational workforce, the cloud, globalization, and many of the other trends that are shaping the world of work? Join us in this session as a panel of experts debates and explores how IT is changing and what the future of IT looks like.

As more and more software product companies are looking to migrate their traditional on-premise software to a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering they are discovering it takes longer than first expected and comes with many challenges.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides a great way to create highly scalable applications. PaaS accelerates application development, testing, deployment and maintenance of your SaaS application.

Join Mark Eisenberg, a thought leader in cloud and mobile, and Motifworks’ Nitin Agarwal to learn how to accelerate your migration to SaaS using PaaS. This webinar will feature a review of the Windows Azure PaaS platform and Motifworks SaaS development framework to further reduce your time-to-market.

Attendees will learn:
* The benefits of Platform as a Service over Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
* How PaaS accelerates development and delivery of SaaS
* Azure Cloud Services (PaaS) overview
* Best practices for great cloud application on Azure PaaS

Join Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, Troy Toman, Cloud Architect at Rackspace and Das Kamhout, IT Principal Engineer at Intel, to discuss updates on Icehouse, the latest OpenStack software release, available on Thursday, April 17. OpenStack Icehouse is the ninth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds. Mark will also review the next OpenStack Summit agenda taking place in Atlanta, Georgia May 12-16, 2014 at the Georgia World Conference Center.

This webinar will cover:
- The latest features and trends from OpenStack Icehouse
- Updated growth metrics from the OpenStack community
- Opportunities to learn more at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta May 12-16, 2014

In today's multi-cloud world, do you find yourself thinking, "I really need an open source private cloud that is completely compatible with leading public clouds, i.e. AWS, GCE."

This webinar explores the anatomy of an OpenStack-powered private cloud built with hybrid computing and DevOps in mind. Join Cloudscaling’s CEO Randy Bias and Scalr CEO Sebastian Stadil as they discuss the design considerations of a hybrid cloud environment that both IT and developers will love. Mark Williams, Redapt’s CTO (former VP of zCloud Infrastructure Operations) will also share real-world experience from implementing one of the first large-scale hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Register today and gain insight into:
- Building OpenStack-powered private clouds
- Private and public cloud interoperability
- Managing your hybrid cloud with an eye to the future
- Lessons from the field; what works and what doesn't

From Agile Methodologies through test-driven development and continuous integration, and powered by the game-changing cultural shift of DevOps, IT organizations everywhere have been dramatically accelerating their delivery of business value. The final step in this race is continuous delivery—from requirements to running systems along a roadway of software— at the breakneck speed of innovation.

Joshua McKenty, one of the fathers of OpenStack and a member of both the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry governance boards, will provide an insider's take on the challenges, successes, failures and controversies of this decade's most profound revolution. Expect to come away with an understanding of:

- Where IaaS and PaaS really fit in the software-defined data center
- How the silos come down
- The changes required for security, disaster recovery and SLA management to survive in this brave new world
- The role of open source frameworks in the modern world
- Real-world case studies: Who's winning at continuous deployment, and how are they doing it?