Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and other recent well-known technology trends in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.  

This channel features presentations by thought leaders who cover the key topic areas in this increasingly important field.

Kubernetes security is crucial in ensuring the safety and integrity of your organization's data and systems. However, keeping up with the latest security threats and vulnerabilities can be a daunting task. This is where Kubernetes Goat comes in - a "vulnerable by design" Kubernetes Cluster environment that allows you to practice and learn Kubernetes security in a hands-on way.

In this webinar, Pragmatic Security Leader Madhu Akula presents the latest version of Kubernetes Goat and demonstrates how to use it to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in Kubernetes and containerized environments. He will cover various attack scenarios and real-world vulnerabilities and show how Kubernetes Goat scenarios can be mapped with them. The session will also explore open-source security tools that can be used to write secure code and deploy secure containers in production.

Key Takeaways:
- Gain practical, hands-on experience with Kubernetes security through 25+ offensive and defensive scenarios.
- Learn about the latest security threats and vulnerabilities in containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native environments.
- Access detailed documentation, labs, and other resources to continue your learning and development in Kubernetes security.
- And more...

Mastering Kubernetes Security with Kubernetes Goat

This presentation explores the benefits and challenges of adopting cloud-native practices for application development and deployment. It highlights the importance of leveraging containers and container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes to achieve scalability, portability, and operational efficiency. You’ll understand key concepts and principles of cloud-native architecture, including how it enables faster software delivery, improved resource utilization, and easier application management. 

Attendees will better understand the strategies and best practices needed to effectively modernize applications and maximize their potential in the cloud-native ecosystem. The presentation will also address potential challenges such as skill gaps, security concerns, and cultural transformation, guiding how to overcome them. By the end of the session, participants will have the necessary knowledge and tools to embark on successful application modernization journeys, empowering them to harness the full potential of cloud-native architecture and drive digital transformation within their organizations.

Topics covered will include:
- Scalability: Cloud-native architectures enable applications to scale easily and efficiently. 
- Portability: Cloud-native architectures promote application portability across different cloud providers and environments. 
- Operational Efficiency: Cloud-native practices promote automation and streamline operational tasks. 
- Faster Software Delivery: Cloud-native architectures facilitate faster software delivery through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). 
- Resilience and Stability: Cloud-native architectures enhance application resilience and stability. 
- Cost Optimization: Cloud-native approaches can optimize resource utilization, enabling organizations to control and manage costs.

Modernizing Applications With Cloud Native Architecture and Containers

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.

Getting Ready for a Multi-Cloud Future with Containers and Kubernetes

Hybrid Cloud has become synonymous with Kubernetes and “Containers” through high charged marketing campaigns from IT behemoths. However, container platforms are just one technology platform potentially included within small, medium or enterprise customer Hybrid Cloud Architectures.  

This presentation describes hybrid cloud as a strategy, then as an architecture, and finally it describes the key technologies involved moving forwards and the areas of Next-Gen Hybrid Cloud still requiring standards development, products and service offerings.

Join as we discuss:
Some of the new Enterprises started with a Public Cloud strategy (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, etc.).
As soon as most organisations are sufficiently mature to require a business O365 service, the organisation then becomes multi-cloud.
Managing a multi-cloud environment is challenging without a hybrid cloud strategy.
What principles might a hybrid cloud strategy have.
What would you expect from the Next-Gen Hybrid Cloud (what should it do).
What are the current relevant product offerings?
This is not just about containers!

Exploring Next-Gen Hybrid Cloud: More Than Containers

In an era where digital environments transcend borders and weave intricate connections between systems, the cloud has emerged as a revolutionary power, reshaping the landscape of business operations and collaboration. While enterprises eagerly embrace the advantages offered by cloud computing, its introduction necessitates protection of these virtual realms from an ever-expanding spectrum of risks. 

The presentation from TD Bank's Pankul Chitrav uncovers the complex web of security hurdles inherent in the realm of the cloud, equipping us with a comprehension of the tools and strategies that lay the foundation of cloud security.

Secure Cloudscape: Exploring Cloud Security Solutions

Prioritizing sound security hygiene is a highly effective practice for companies to significantly reduce the risk of security incidents, but unfortunately, is often overlooked. 

In this presentation, Bojan Magusic, program manager and author of Azure Security, will share a real-world security incident (without disclosing specific details or names). He will provide an overview of the incident, including its effects on the organization, followed by a discussion of potential preventive measures. Bojan will also share trends he sees in the real world, some best practices on how organizations should approach governance, readiness, and leadership support, and more.

At the end of this session, you can expect to:
- Be able to explain why cloud security posture should be an organizational-wide priority. 
- Understand how lack of security hygiene can impact your organization and its business.
- Understand which security misconfigurations of cloud services you should prioritize and fix first. 
- Understand which cloud services are targeted more often than others, even across multi-cloud.
- Learn how to use infrastructure as code to embed security hygiene into pre-deployment.

Why Should Cloud Security Posture Be Your #1 Priority?

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, security incidents are a constant threat. To effectively protect your cloud infrastructure and data, mastering automated incident response is no longer an option -- it's a necessity. Join us for an insightful session as we delve into the world of cloud incident response automation.

In this session, we will explore the strategies and essential tools that empower organizations to respond swiftly and decisively to security incidents in the cloud. We'll uncover the key considerations and best practices that can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a full-blown security breach. We will be covering
- Understand why automation is a game-changer in cloud incident response. Discover how it reduces response time, minimizes human error, and ensures consistent actions in the face of threats.
- Learn battle-tested strategies for crafting a robust incident response plan tailored to your cloud environment. From threat detection to containment and recovery, we'll cover it all.
- Explore the cutting-edge tools and technologies that can help you implement your automated incident response strategy effectively. 
- Strategies for introducing automation, iteratively investing and measuring effectiveness. 
- How recent developments in Artificial Intelligence have reduced noise and resulted in effective scenario recognition and response. 

About the speaker
Elango is an CISSP certified and accomplished technology leader with 20+ years of experience building high-performance engineering organizations for high-tech and financial services businesses across multiple geographies. With an in-depth understanding of governance, compliance, regulatory, and cybersecurity requirements of ASEAN markets, Elango has championed several cloud implementations that meet the highest standards of security and compliance for top-tier banks across Singapore, Thailand and the United States.

Mastering Automated Cloud Security Incident Response: Strategies and Tools

As Kubernetes continues to revolutionize container orchestration, understanding how to secure your clusters becomes increasingly vital. In this discussion we'll focus on fundamental principles of access control, from the foundations of authentication methods to the intricate world of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), creating and managing roles. We'll also look at the world of open-source tools designed to simplify access management. Discover how Paralus - a Kubernetes access management tool - can simplify and enhance your access management practices, offering you an added layer of confidence in securing your Kubernetes clusters. 

Whether you're a Kubernetes veteran or just venturing into the world of containerization, this talk promises to deliver fresh insight.

Securing Kubernetes: Exploring Access Management Techniques

As organizations move to adopt multi-cloud architectures to leverage the benefits of multiple cloud service providers, achieving high security is both more essential and more elusive. 

The complexity of multi-cloud environments poses unique challenges, such as securing data across different cloud platforms, managing access controls, and mitigating risks associated with inter-cloud communication. 

In this webinar, we will explore key considerations and best practices for securing multi-cloud architectures. We will discuss strategies for protecting data in transit and at rest, implementing encryption, and managing authentication and authorization in a multi-cloud environment. We will also review techniques for monitoring and detecting security threats, and multi-cloud incident response and recovery.

Steps for Ensuring Multi-Cloud Architecture Security

It’s hard enough building a secure by design cloud infrastructure on one platform but what happens when you adopt a modern, multi -cloud strategy and still have to apply security that protects the data but does not cripple the users? It becomes a significant challenge, especially as you are no longer securing just the environments but the multiple routes between them.

As more organisations choose a multi-cloud strategy, the need for security is very real. Join this webinar to understand how to build in security from the outset but also how to retro-fit security elements when a single cloud strategy morphs into a multi-cloud one.

In this webinar we will examine:
- The broad rules of multi-cloud security.
- What is different in the multi-cloud world.
- How to adapt your security strategy to an accidental environment.

About the speaker
An established thought leader and innovator, Simon serves as a Virtual CIO, CIO Advisor and Leadership Mentor for a wide variety of organisations.  Simon works with organisations to build high performing IT teams, develop structured training and development plans and to foster a culture of innovation and change. Simon holds a Masters in Psychology and is a trained accountant and former finance director as well as being an RFU Licensed Rugby Coach.

Securing multi-cloud architecture

Cloud governance has now become necessary with the increase of businesses choosing to migrate their operations into the cloud environment.  Cloud services has become the key driver for digitalization and resilience, from its acceleration and reliance because of the pandemic. How did cloud services increase in value to become the core of digital disruptions? 

According to studies from Oxford Economics, the outlook of cloud adoption was considered an inflated expectation for future business use. This evolved and paved the way to the realization of cloud implementation. The challenge to be taken is to undergo a “healthy process” to refine and tune its application for business utilization. Cloud services took on a mindset towards a more realistic approach from a strategic perspective in order to execute ways of implementation.

This is why cloud governance plays a significant role in achieving the full potential of cloud technology aligned with business objectives. Tune into this in-depth webinar to discuss:
- What actually is cloud governance and why do businesses need it?
- What is its application to cloud management?
- How did cloud services evolve strategically to necessitate the need for governance and what role does it play in businesses and its value?
- The definition of cloud compliance from a business, cloud services market and various regional government perspectives.

Cloud Governance: What is its business value?

As organizations increasingly migrate their infrastructure to the cloud, ensuring the performance, availability, and reliability of cloud resources becomes paramount. The cloud environment brings tremendous benefits in terms of scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. However, these benefits come with unique challenges that must be addressed through effective monitoring practices. 

One of the primary goals of infrastructure monitoring in the cloud is to proactively identify and address performance issues before they impact users. By continuously monitoring key metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, network latency, and storage capacity, organizations can detect bottlenecks, identify potential failures, and take timely actions to optimize resource allocation.

Infrastructure monitoring in the cloud: Optimizing performance and availability

Everyone wants their applications to be scalable and highly available, and doing so while optimising costs is critical. That's where multi-tenancy comes in. It allows companies to optimise their costs and resources while providing the same level of service to multiple customers. 
 
That is only possible when there's an efficient monitoring and observing system in place. These systems help organisations with enhanced visibility and better issue detection along with better resource utilisation and optimisation.
 
Multi-tenant systems can be hard and complex to manage and hence organisations need to identify the right way to implement observability. Which tools to use, how to configure them, strategies and approaches for centralised monitoring for complete visibility.
 
Tune into this session from industry thought leader Atulpriya Sharma to learn more about the points above as well as witness a demo of multi-tenancy monitoring using Prometheus and Thanos receiver.

Monitoring multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments: Challenges and solutions

Whether your enterprise is cloud native or has evolved into cloud use, you likely are employing a great many clouds in delivering services to end users: dozens of SaaS applications, and two or more IaaS and PaaS providers hosting applications you develop or deploy in-house. This state of affairs has been a decade in the making - no one can claim it snuck up on them! But, all too often, enterprise cloud management has not kept up with the realities of cloud use. The recent pandemic accelerate migration of resources to cloud for many organizations, and the accelerated shift highlighted—and exacerbated—the problems with managing across clouds. 

Join Nemertes for an overview of how to approach bringing order to the chaos, and a method to the madness!

Embracing multi-cloud management for hybrid service delivery

Enterprise Strategy Group conducted an in-depth survey of 357 IT, DevOps, and application development professionals to understand the current state, challenges, and opportunities in observability and found:
1. There is near-universal pressure on organizations to accelerate operations.
2. As observability practices expand, complexity and tool sprawl increase.
3. AIOps and cloud cost optimization tools burgeon to accelerate IT and DevOps.

In this engaging research-based presentation, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lead Analyst for Observability, Sustainability, and IT Operations will give an overview of the current state of adoption and explore the three major themes that are impacting how organizations adopt, deploy, and use Observability tools today.  Use this information to benchmark your own observability practice and to learn best practices that organizations use to get the most value from their observability investments.

Observability- From code to cloud

Cloud storage has become an essential component of many businesses' IT infrastructure. However, storing data in the cloud comes with its own unique set of security challenges. This webinar will cover best practices for ensuring the security of your business data in the cloud. We will discuss topics such as data encryption, access control, network segmentation, software updates, and security audits. We will also examine the risks associated with cloud storage, such as data breaches, data loss, and insider threats. Additionally, we will explore the security measures taken by cloud service providers and how to evaluate their security. Finally, we will examine emerging trends and technologies in cloud storage security. This webinar is suitable for anyone interested in cloud storage security, including IT professionals, business owners, and decision-makers.

Key Takeaways : 
- Cloud storage security is essential for protecting your business data from data breaches, data loss, and insider threats.
- Best practices for cloud storage security include data encryption, access control, network segmentation, software updates, and regular security audits.
- Cloud service providers have their own security measures in place, but it's important to evaluate their security and ensure they meet your organization's security requirements.
- Emerging trends and technologies in cloud storage security include serverless computing security and security automation.
- Regularly assessing and updating your cloud storage security measures is important to stay ahead of evolving security threats.

Cloud storage security: How to ensure your data is secure in the cloud

In recent years, cloud backups have become all the rage, and for good reason. Cloud backups solve many of the most pressing challenges associated with conventional backups. Even so, not all cloud backups are created equally, and in some situations it might even be better not to use a cloud backup.

This informative and vendor neutral presentation from best-selling author and expert Brien Posey will explore numerous practical considerations as they relate to cloud backups. In it, you will learn various strategies for keeping your data better protected while also keeping costs in check. A few of the topics of discussion include:

- When you should and shouldn’t back up to the cloud.
- Important features to look for in a cloud backup solution.
- Strategies for meeting your backup SLAs.
- The true cost of cloud backup and restoration.

About the speaker:
Brien Posey is an internationally best-selling technology author and speaker, and a 21x Microsoft MVP. Prior to going freelance, Posey served as CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities, a network engineer for the United States Department of Defense at Fort Knox, and as a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in America. In addition to his ongoing work in IT, Posey has been training to be a commercial astronaut since 2015 in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space.

Practical considerations for cloud backups

By now, we all see the opportunity with core cloud storage services. The object storage that seems to underlie everything we do in IT these days.  But cloud storage is becoming more than just objects in space -- it's evolving up the stack to include more layers of critical management, security, functionality, and even utility!  And of course, most IT vendors are claiming their solutions, whatever they really are, are now also cloud solutions. Overall cloud adoption is still growing, but the very definition of cloud itself is changing too. What does cloud storage really mean today and where is it going?

In this webinar, Mike Matchett, Principal Analyst with Small World Big Data, will look at some key data and cloud storage trends driving our use of the word “cloud”. We'll unpack some new ways to stay in control of hybrid architectures, securing the no-longer centralized data center, and manage edge data intelligence. Users need to stay ahead of the latest trends driving big changes in data storage. How do we handle support for new big AI models (i.e., when every LOB wants their own ChatGPT...), end user expectations for seamless global access to data anywhere, clean data security in a hostile internet, and what the heck is zero trust, really, just between you and me?  

Starting today, where should we put our mighty but limited data storage efforts in 2023? Should we still be managing storage, or should the AI be managing it for us?

About the speaker 
Mike has been writing and publishing expert IT industry analysis and nuanced market-focused opinions, articles and technology reports for over 17 years. In addition to being widely quoted, you can find his analysis and opinions in publications like SearchStorage, SearchDatacenter, Virtualization Review, InfoStor and Enterprise Systems Journal.

Ever changing clouds: Is that a castle or a clown?

Watering the Data Center for a Greener Tomorrow

Energy Efficient Data Centres: The Consultant's Perspective

Forward thinking to Maximise Data Centre Efficiency

Efficient Data Centre – The Role of the CDCEP

DCiM: Changing the Landscape of the Data Center and IT Operations

Top 10 Myths About Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Storage Best Practices for Energy Efficiency

Turning Your Data Center Green

Cooling Larger Data Centres with Fresh Air and Direct Evaporative Cooling

Improving Your Data Centre Management Techniques

The European Programme for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres: Code of Conduct

Operational Visibility into Your Cloud Services

Efficient Data Center

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