Efficiency and Ecological Responsibility of Cloud Computing

Building a cloud storage architecture requires both storage vendors, cloud service providers and large enterprises to consider new technical and economic paradigms in order to enable a flexible and cost efficient architecture.

Economic:
Cloud infrastructure is often procured by service providers and large enterprises in the traditional way – prepay for expected future storage needs and over provision for unexpected changes in demand. This requires large capital expenditures with slow cost recovery based on fluctuating customer adoption. Giving these cloud service providers flexibility in the procurement model for their storage allows them to more closely align the expenditure on infrastructure resources with the cost recovery from customers, optimizing the use of both CapEx and OpEx budgets.

Technical:
Clouds inherently require often unpredictable scalability – both up and down. Building a storage architecture with the ability to rapidly allocate resources for a specific customer need and reallocate resources based on changing customer requirements allows the cloud service provider to optimize storage capacity and performance pools in their data center without compromising the responsiveness to the change in needs. Such architecture should also align to the datacenter level orchestration system to allow for even higher level of resource optimization and flexibility.

In this webcast, you will learn:
•How modern storage technology allows you to build this infrastructure
•The role of software defined storage
•Accounting principles
•How to model cloud costs of new applications and or re-engineering existing applications
•Performance considerations

Being deemed as the "most significant tech acquisition of 2018," IBM's purchase of Red Hat for $34 billion is not your average M&A. Apparently the cloud computing industry is in for another major disruption as a purchase of this size could change the market forever.

The biggest issue being addressed with this deal is the ability to easily move data around and between platforms, and ultimately expanding upon hybrid cloud offerings. Join this live expert panel discussion with cloud industry visionaries as they discuss the following:

- What this means for IBM and Red Hat's competitors
- Who is it relevant to and why?
- Is this is an indication of other big cloud computing deals to come and if so, how should enterprises prepare when selecting their technology providers?
- What does this mean for hybrid cloud and containers?
- Will this acquisition be different from HP's acquisition of Compaq? Of others in the Cloud market?

Moderator: Mark Thiele, Director of Engineering - Edge Computing, Ericsson
Panelists: Rob Hirschfeld, Founder/CEO, RackN and Ian Smith, CEO, Gospel Technology

Tune into this live webcam panel moderated by Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor & Founding Partner, Kumulus Technologies for a discussion around benefits of and best practices for cloud-native architectures.

An open cloud-native architecture extends beyond containers and microservices, and also includes creating a culture of DevOps and NetOps and increasing developer efficiency.

Moderator: Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor & Founding Partner, Kumulus Technologies
Panelists: Kingston Smiler, Co-Founder, PALC Networks

CEOs and boards are demanding their IT departments pursue a cloud-first, or all-in cloud, strategy, but not all clouds are created equal. A multi-cloud strategy is most prudent for enterprise businesses but to do so different business, system, application and cost drivers must be considered. In this presentation we will help you create a strategic buying framework for pursuing a multi-cloud strategy that pulls in both public cloud and private cloud services.

About the speaker:

In her role as Vice President of Cloud Services, Meg Ramsey sets the cloud strategy and vision for Sungard AS. Leading a team of product managers dedicated to delivering cloud infrastructure services for enterprise clients, she focuses on delivering application recovery and interoperability across all cloud platforms. Her efforts directly support Sungard AS’ strategic growth initiatives and include building partnerships with AWS and VMware to expand Sungard AS’ modern service offerings. Ramsey brings extensive consulting and strategy experience within the cloud, IT infrastructure and telecommunications industries. Prior to joining Sungard AS, Ramsey held positions at Accenture and Internap. She received her BS from Georgia Institute of Technology and a MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cloud computing has become synonymous with the digital agenda. Looking across the 2018 IT estate, cloud is no longer conspicuous by its presence but by its absence. Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud service industry at nearly three times the growth of the overall IT services industry through 2022. Cloud is agnostic of industry sector, having already established a material foothold in banks, schools, governments and healthcare.

In this webinar, we will explore what a cloud-first policy means for you no matter where you are on your cloud journey, with a focus on both where your remaining on-premise IT estate sits and how this fits into a cloud-first world.

About the speaker:
Mike is a TOGAF and SAFe certified architect specialising in the strategic enterprise and solutions architecture space, with a solid background in integration, application, infrastructure and data architecture.

He has a proven track record of delivering strategic business goals through business transformation programmes (up to £30M+) with complex interdependencies across the enterprise. Mike has extensive sector experience having worked in financial services, retail banking, digital eCommerce, not for profit, utilities and FMCG organisations.

He has a comprehensive background of technology leadership and transformation, business process re-engineering and systems integration over a wide range of heterogeneous technology environments, from hybrid cloud solutions to physical on-premise estates.

There is much talk in the tech community about the best approach to adopting a cloud first strategy and which solutions best fit organisations.

Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, cloud first, cloud native are all options but too many organisations miss the critical factor. Any technology strategy requires that the organisational culture and the people match the technology approach. A cloud first technology strategy requires a very different mindset to more traditional approaches and adopting a different culture and approach and leading a team of people in this world is very different. Building technology without the underpinning cultural change invariably results in less than successful cloud adoption.

In this webinar, we will examine some of the simple changes that can be made to the culture and structure of an IT function to create a foundation for a more successful implementation of a cloud first strategy.

You promised your customers that you would anticipate next-generation Cloud infrastructure needs. Let Spirent assure that you keep it.

Are your applications getting enough allocated resources to perform at their best? Ability to baseline and benchmark the underlying infrastructure, and simulate any type of application workload – allows you to validate both the functionality and performance of various applications and services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) running over the virtualized infrastructure. Join us to learn how Spirent can help you fast track Cloud deployments.

For the last few years, there has been an ongoing debate about multi-cloud/hybrid cloud vs single cloud approach. However, there is increasing evidence that the future will be multi-cloud. Data from a recent survey released by Forrester Research indicates:

62% of public cloud adopters are using 2+ unique cloud environments/platforms

74% of enterprises describe their strategy as hybrid/multi-cloud today

So, the question is what does this mean for your applications? Does adopting multi-cloud increase management complexity? How can you effectively control and manage spend?

In this webinar, we will discuss the benefits and challenges of a multi-cloud approach. We will see how containers are becoming a key building block for enabling application portability and how Kubernetes is becoming the toolbox across clouds. Finally, we will discuss real-world best practices for enabling multi-cloud deployments.

About the speaker:
Ritesh Patel is co-founder of Nirmata and has 20+ years experience building and delivering enterprise software solutions and has led highly successful software and business development teams. Ritesh began his career in engineering for high tech firms and has since migrated to the business side of the operation. In his founding of Nirmata, Ritesh sought to bring his broad spectrum of experience to a single previously unaddressed industry problem through the creation of a new business. To Nirmata’s leadership, Ritesh brings a rare skill set incorporating experience with the entire chain of software development activities. This background has contributed to Nirmata’s commitment to empowering all employees to do the hard work required to deliver tools that solve tough problems.

We are already on the edge of a new paradigm in IT where developers can focus purely on their code and the applications are delivered by the cloud provider who delivers computing power as required.

Whilst this approach works for cloud native applications, how do we integrate these next generation clouds with the legacy systems we already have? How do we create a serverless environment after years of creating servers and how do we connect seemingly un-connectable systems such as mainframes into this new paradigm?

In this webinar we examine the tools and options now available and soon to be available in the next generation of cloud computing and seek to understand how these connect back to the current world and establish some possible journeys for the legacy applications into the next generation of cloud.

The Long Term Retention Technical Working Group and the Data Protection Committee will review the results of the 2017 100-year archive survey. In addition to the survey results, the presentation will cover the following topics:
· How the use of storage for archiving has evolved in ten years
· What type of information is now being retained and for how long
· Changes in corporate practices
· Impact of technology changes such as Cloud

In 2014, the founders of VerticalRent (www.verticalrent.com) were featured by Microsoft BizSpark for their early achievements with launching the industry leading rental property management and tenant screening software platform for property managers and landlords. In that article, Microsoft wrote: Matt Angerer is an IT professional by day and a landlord by night. At all times, he has an entrepreneur’s heart and mindset.

A lot has changed since 2014. VerticalRent has more than quadrupled in the sheer number of landlords using the platform from every corner of the United States. The one thing that has not changed is that VerticalRent remains a small operation without employees that epitomizes the concept of a Lean Startup. If you're an IT professional by day who has been toiling with the idea of launching your own "side-gig", you'll want to tune into this BrightTalk webinar to learn how Matt Angerer, Founder of VerticalRent, started with a simple idea and scaled it into a platform that services over 25,000 landlords and nearly 50,000 renters across the United States in 5 short-years -- all while keeping his day job, running his rental properties, and financially supporting a family of 4.

Matt will share with you the techniques he learned that allowed him to balance his personal and professional life to create a software as a service business. In this Webinar, he'll cover:
- The Learn Start Up Mentality - What it Means and How to Live it Day by Day
- Why a Slow-Growth Approach is Better for Certain Personality Types
- How Anyone Can Create a SaaS Platform to Create Side Revenue
- Why SaaS is More Lucrative in the Long-Term than Consulting
- The Darkside of Entrepreneurship and Why Its Necessary

Join us on Wednesday, October 3rd at 9am PT / 12pm ET for this live interview!

Building a Hybrid IT Blueprint – Discover the right mix of public vs. private providers and services for your application portfolio

Many decision makers will say they need more information. The reality is that most leaders are actually drowning in information. What they really need is to move from information to clarity to insight. Attend our talk on building a hybrid it blueprint to see how CloudGenera can quickly take large amounts of data about your applications and provide data-driven analysis on best execution venue. We believe these sorts of insights should happen in minutes not months.

Attendees will learn the following:

•Elements that must be part of Total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis
•How to analyze public vs. private execution venues
•How to quickly revisit decisions when inputs or market factors change