Efficiency and Ecological Responsibility of Cloud Computing

As businesses become increasingly dependent on SAP HANA for real-time decisions, the demands of the infrastructure continue to grow. A more efficient and modern infrastructure is required to meet the demands of these global always on real-time environments. Storage plays a crucial role in maintaining high service levels and guarding against costly downtime. The right storage for SAP HANA is all flash.
Join us as Jeff Kato, Senior Analyst and Consultant from Taneja Group describes why all flash is the best choice for HANA. Jeff will also provide a comparison of the leading all flash solutions in the market and illustrate where 3PAR All Flash leads the competition in critical storage efficiency metrics. Stephen Carpenter, Master Technologist from HPE’s Storage Business Unit, will share some key insights that distinguishes 3PAR StoreServ architecturally for HANA workloads. Additionally, Hasmig Samurkashian, Product Manager from the HPE Storage team will share actual customer deployment examples.

Presenters:
Jeff Kato, Senior Analyst & Consultant, Taneja Group
Stephen Carpenter, Master Technologist, Advanced Technology Center, HPE Storage
Hasmig Samurkashian, WW Solutions Product Manager, HPE Storage

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of IT at the present time. IoT involves the linking of physical entities (“things”) with IT systems that derive information about or from those things which can be used to drive a wide variety of applications and services. IoT covers a very wide spectrum of applications, spanning enterprises, governments and consumers and represents the integration of systems from traditionally different communities: Information Technology and Operational Technology. As a result, it is important for IoT systems to have architectures, systems principles, and operations that can accommodate the interesting scale, safety, reliability, and privacy requirements. Attend this webinar to hear best practices for supporting the Internet of Things (IoT) using cloud computing.

Security and compliance standards for IOT are top of mind as viruses such as Marai plague unsuspecting devices. Join Jeanne Morain and special guests Christ Armstrong Teknow Consulting as they provide insights and solutions to secure IOT devices on your cloud infrastructure.

This exciting panel explores the kinds of storage that IoT solutions demand. We talk about what’s different about data storage for IoT compared to existing enterprise applications, what capabilities are required to support massive, distributed IoT networks, and how and why existing storage solutions may or may not be the best IoT application storage. Plan on getting into unique IoT data protection concerns, real-time data pipelines, machine learning, data accessibility, distributed processing, and of course, what’s actually practical for the IoT already emerging in today’s data center.

Panel:
Cloudera: Dave Shuman, Industry Lead for IoT & Manufacturing
Qumulo: Joel Groen, Senior Product Manager
Red Hat: Ishu Verma, IoT Technical Evangelist

Learn how to securely configure host settings and Docker Engine.

Docker allows teams to increase the speed and scale that they can deliver software. As a result, adoption rates for docker are accelerating as more organizations are looking for ways to innovate faster.

As you move down the path to containers, it is important to note that an out-of-the box installation of just about any Linux distribution is capable of running the Docker daemon and Docker containers, but it will leave your host exposed to many security and performance concerns if not configured properly.

Join us for this webinar to learn how to:
- Configure host settings to harden and protect it from unauthorized access
- Install and configure a Docker Engine with minimal attack surface
- Ensure that the host has the necessary integration with existing enterprise systems like SIEM and enterprise directories

Every IT organisation is under pressure to deliver services as efficiently as possible, utilising infrastructure and services that may have a significant impact on the financial position and results of the organisation

Historically, cloud technology has made reference to the potential benefits of transferring costs from the balance sheet (capex) to the income statement (opex). However, an unintended consequence has been that few, if any, cloud related costs could be capitalised. This may not be the desired outcome for all organisations and the capitalisation of certain types of cloud technology maybe preferred, or even required by accounting standards. This session explores this area and what key considerations can be given to the capitalisation of cloud.

Interview in partnership with BrightTALK, The Stack and Cloud Industry Forum
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In this interview John Abel, the Head of Technology and Cloud for UK, Ireland and Israel at Oracle, is discussing the latest innovations in the cloud and how these impact the modern business environment.

Among topics discussed:

- Cloud in 2020
- Extreme innovations in the cloud
- Challenges with cloud adoption today
- Legacy organisations and digital transformation in the cloud
- "What does lobsters have to do with innovation"
- Top 3 pieces of advice for aspiring technology leaders

About the Speaker:
John Abel has worked with Oracle for over 20 years and during this time he has worked in Support, Applications, Technology and Consulting.

More recently John has been in Oracle Systems for four years. John's main focus now is Engineered Systems and Oracle Database Cloud (Database as a Service) across Europe, Middle East and Africa and he often uses his prior experience to explain all aspects of technology to customers. In his presentations, John relates to actual customer experience and provides real world answers to real world problems. John is also a successful Oracle Press Author and using his experience of over 300+ customer engagements has produced publications explaining the Oracle Technology and Applications.

Interview in partnership with BrightTALK, The Stack and Cloud Industry Forum
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In this interview, Sandra Bell, Head of BC & ISDG Consulting (Europe), Sungard, will share with us how tech innovations impact the moderb BCDR strategies.

Topics up for discussion:

- Innovations in the cloud and BCDR
- Critical things to know when creating a BCDR strategy
- Latest trends in disaster recovery
- Business continuity and digital transformation
- Technology recovery solutions and local resilience strategies
- And others

About the Speaker:
Sandra is a seasoned risk and business continuity professional with over 25 years’ experience of the design and management of strategic, business friendly risk, continuity and security solutions in public and private sectors. Experience ranges from: the management of risk and the protection of data within the UK’s main business process outsourcer to the financial and government sectors; to the protection of the largest part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure.

Today's IT is struggling with trying to keep the lights on for sometimes 100s or 1000s of applications built on legacy architectures while also attempting to turn on a dime in an era when business expects "just in time" IT. What strategies can you employ to help bridge the gap from yesterday to today and tomorrow? Where do you need to look for change (technologies, service providers, organizational) and what is possible through that change? Finally, what assumptions about what's possible for you to have to break through with yourself, your management and your customers?

What does it mean to achieve true agility, visibility, and security in your cloud and DevOps environment?

With Agility enable successful cloud deployments to meet the demands of scale.
With visibility drive reducing MTBF(mean-time-between-failures) and MTTR (mean-time-to-resolve).
With security ensure your Cloud environments are secure.

Join Syamla Bandla, VP of Global Cloud Operations and DevOps at Qualys and recipient of the Top Women in Cloud Award 2016, for a technical deep-dive into cloud applications and operations in the 21st century.

About the presenter:

Syamla has over 18 years building, scaling and transforming high-performance operations and engineering teams in the US, Europe and Asia. She has taken multiple organizations through various phases of organization building and transformation, transformed technology organizations from the ground up and taken multiple Cloud and SaaS products to market.

At RMS, Syamla was responsible for hybrid cloud engineering and operations, platform services, devops, and database operations & engineering, operational intelligence, monitoring and service Level management functions for all client facing cloud based products and services.

Prior to RMS, she was Head of SaaS Production Engineering and Operations team at Dell. Responsible for end to end service delivery of SaaS Products to production and managed Global Production Engineering and Operations teams across Europe, Asia and North America.

Syamla came to Dell as part of the start-up acquisition of “Everdream Corp” which built a Systems Management SaaS product. After the acquisition her responsibilities grew to integrating and building Global Production Engineering and Operations teams for four additional SaaS products.

Syamla Joined Dell from Fidelity Investments in Boston where she worked as Lead Network Engineer. In that role, she supported the critical infrastructure and network for mission critical trading floor applications and services.

The application lifecycle is fundamentally changing at a greater rate and amplitude. Accordingly, cloud services are integral to the application architecture and implementation. A key challenge to overcome is how to monitor with discipline these applications that are driving disruptive innovation in their respective industries.

In this session, we will discuss how to monitor cloud applications with discipline in order to ensure seamless application integration and delivery.
- What defines successful cloud applications?
- How do I apply a foundational set of skills like monitoring as a discipline to guarantee successful cloud outcomes?

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds with over 20 years of IT experience specializing in virtualization and cloud management. He is a US Patent holder, VMware vExpert™, Cisco® Champion, and active contributing thought leader within the virtualization community.

Cloud adoption is booming, with the major providers likely to top $100 billion in revenue by 2020. As enterprise IT organizations place a larger proportion of their application portfolios in cloud environments, they face a choice: manage those applications with the native tools offered by the cloud providers, or use third-party tools. This presentation examines the tradeoffs IT organizations face when deciding on which approach to use, along with the pros and cons of each approach. Specific topics addressed include:

- Technical approaches to managing cloud-based applications
- Tradeoffs in using cloud provider or third-party management solutions
- The challenge of innovation: managing applications that use higher-level cloud services
- How business value changes the cloud management decision
- The unaddressed cloud management challenge: economics

The webinar presenter has worked in cloud computing for over a decade, including at two cloud management software companies. He was also named by Wired.com as one of the ten most influential persons in cloud computing. Be sure to attend this webinar to learn from his experiences — good and bad — in this field!

Continuous Testing enables delivery of applications with greater speed and agility, without compromising quality. However, this places a demand on the application team to ensure complete coverage of the test cases, multiplied by the clients and devices that most accurately represent our users. The answer lies in the public cloud, but this isn’t without risks and complexity.

In this webinar, HPE will discuss the benefits and issues teams encounter when building a Continuous Testing pipeline using a public or private cloud infrastructure, and how to ensure the highest application quality, at the speed of your business.

In this webinar we will explore:

What tests to run and when
Environment coverage
Optimizing your execution costs
Exploratory testing to fill the gaps

BrightTALK caught up with vArmour's Chief Strategist, Mark Weatherford for an in-depth conversation on the current state of information security, today's threatscape and a discussion on the cyber industry.

Topics up for discussion:

- The rise of Ransomware and where companies are more vulnerable
- DDoS and why it's still a key threat to businesses
- The increased vulnerability of the IoT
- Challenges for Donald Trump and his new cyber team
- How to boost equality and diversity in the information security industry
- How cloud and virtualization are changing the security game

About the Speaker:
Mark Weatherford is Chief Cybersecurity Strategist at vArmour, the data center and cloud security company. He was formerly a Principal at the Chertoff Group, was Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity at DHS, was Chief Security Officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and was the CISO for the states of California and Colorado. He also served as a cryptologic officer in the US Navy. Weatherford is a Director on the Boards of Coalfire, the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security (CCHS) at the George Washington University, and the National Cybersecurity Center (NCC) in Colorado Springs. He is also on the Advisory Board at both Cylance and AlertEnterprise.

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) across different environments. However, what do these approaches mean for a hyperconverged storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Find out in this live SNIA-ESF webcast where expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, will move beyond the hype to discuss:

· What are the storage considerations for CI, CIB and HCI
· Fast applications and fast servers need fast server storage I/O
· Networking and server storage I/O considerations
· How to avoid aggravation-causing aggregation (bottlenecks)
· Aggregated vs. disaggregated vs. hybrid converged
· Planning, comparing, benchmarking and decision-making
· Data protection, management and east-west I/O traffic
· Application and server I/O north-south traffic

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=613

The organisational impact of “cloud” adoption (in all its guises), as well as other modern enterprise technologies, is a topic of relevance to IT and business leaders in all industry sectors.
The much vaunted shift to "everything-as-a-service" will have major implications not only on the tasks and services that IT departments traditionally perform, but the skills required in the organisation and the nature of the relationship that “IT” has with the “business”. Shadow IT is now a fact of life in most organisations. Business customers expect IT to take more of a leadership role in defining and enabling business strategy.
Or will it? Is it? Do they?
Join our panel of CxOs sharing real world experience as they debate the key factors impacting the performance of IT and how it evolves to meet the challenges
Panellists:
Mark Dermody, IT Director Costa Coffee
Nick Skelsey - IT Director Europe, Harding Retail (a member of Flemingo Duty Free)
Rob Pritchard - ex-CIO Britvic and visiting professor at Birmingham City University (moderator)
Nick Good - Director of Performance & Metrics, Office of the CIO Liberty Global/Virgin Media

The demand for digital data preservation has increased drastically in recent years. Maintaining a large amount of data for long periods of time (months, years, decades, or even forever) becomes even more important given government regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, OSHA, and many others that define specific preservation periods for critical records.

While the move from paper to digital information over the past decades has greatly improved information access, it complicates information preservation. This is due to many factors including digital format changes, media obsolescence, media failure, and loss of contextual metadata. The Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) was created by SNIA to facilitate long-term data storage and preservation. SIRF can be used with disk, tape, and cloud based storage containers, and is extensible to any new storage technologies. It provides an effective and efficient way to preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape.
Join this webcast to learn:
•Key challenges of long-term data retention
•How the SIRF format works and its key elements
•How SIRF supports different storage containers - disks, tapes, CDMI and the cloud
•Availability of Open SIRF

SNIA experts that developed the SIRF standard will be on hand to answer your questions.