Digital Transformation: How to Reboot IT & Business Collaboration

Smart cities are driving towards Digital Transformation to improve city operations and citizen services. Innovative outdoor Edge technologies deployed on smart streetlights will accelerate that transformation by powering connected sensors and controls, collecting data, managing devices and cybersecurity, local processing, backhaul over wireless networks, and cloud applications for user displays, alerts, reporting and data analytics.
This webinar introduces an Innovative, outdoor Smart City Edge IoT Platform. Installed on a luminaire, the Edge-based platform performs multiple data functions for connected sensors – capture, analysis, aggregation from multiple sensors, and communication – to cloud SaaS applications. In addition, the Edge platform delivers network flexibility, communicating data to the cloud over both wireless smart grid and cellular networks.
Technology factors driving Edge platform adoption and wireless infrastructures for smart city applications will be discussed:
•Improve security
•Speed data analysis
•Reduce the volume of data transmissions
•Lower hardware compute and storage costs
•Edge Analytics
oDiagnostic analysis
oMetrics and measurement for real-time analysis
oData analysis plus Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Real and installed “smart” applications using this technology – urban planning, traffic statistics, bicycle and people counting, road condition monitoring, environmental air quality, power line monitoring, video and audio analytics – and their associated benefits will be highlighted.

Edge computing continues to make headlines as leading enterprises, including Amazon and Walmart, announce differentiation strategies centered around this emerging compute paradigm.

Centralized cloud infrastructure, as we know it today, isn’t equipped to handle the amount of data being generated by an explosion of connected devices. At the same time, user expectations around speed, availability, security, privacy, personalization and more are driving application developers to seek new ways to differentiate themselves in crowded markets. Many software architects are turning to edge computing as a path to innovation.

Join Wes Reisz (VP of Technology at Section and Co-host of the InfoQ Podcast) as he demonstrates why now is the time to adopt an effective edge strategy and what it means to architect, build and deploy edge-aware distributed systems.

Key Takeaways:

- Understand the current state of edge computing and common use cases driving adoption, including real-world stories of how organizations are leveraging application architecture as a competitive advantage.
- Gain tactical insights on how to evaluate your current application architecture to identify opportunities and begin implementing an effective edge strategy today.
- Learn how to speed up development cycles, eliminate operational overhead, and improve developer experience using automation techniques such as GitOps at the edge.

As 5G roll-outs take off, enabling a variety of new applications and services running at the network Edge plays an essential role in establishing new business models and revenue streams. Digital transformation becomes a pre-requisite for the 5G networks offering automation, zero-touch management and orchestration of not only the necessary resources and connectivity needed for edge computing and of the edge computing platforms offered, but also the applications running at the edge.

Multi-vendor deployments require interoperability, enabled by the current standardization work support as well as its further evolution in support of emerging business models and their required deployment models. Standards Developing Organizations such as ETSI NFV, ETSI ZSM as well as 3GPP and open source initiatives are building blocks for multi-vendor deployments and for rapidly adding new edge applications and services.

The most promising use cases for edge computing, related to demanding network features and scenarios like industrial IoT, require to go beyond current network services, and support a much more dynamic way of consuming them.

The traditional borders between local and wide area networks, between network segments, and between application and network services themselves tend to blur into a continuum of network services supporting user applications.

Techniques like the emerging In-Network Computing paradigm require multi-dimensional openness (among computing environments, across network segments, along geographical areas and operators…) and have to rely on holistic network orchestration to achieve the promise of an elastic edge.

This webinar will examine Edge Computing across a variety of environments and discuss how to build a stable, secure and manageable Edge environment that can form the foundation for transformational change within organisations. Edge is not a new idea but exploiting the Edge effectively does require some new thinking some of which is counter-intuitive in the modern cloud centric world in which we operate. 5G is going to unleash a whole new wave of possibilities around remote devices and as IT functions we are going to be under more and more pressure to deliver on the promise so we need to get our houses in order and build a platform that will act as a springboard and not pitch us flat on our faces.

Jacob will discuss the ramifications of 5G transformation and associated challenges from a security standpoint.

He will also cover the fundamentals of industry transformation to 5G, SDN and NGA, both industrial and commercial, and what to expect from such a technological shift.


About the presenter:
Jacob has been the IT Director at Phoenix IS-IT Corporation, a subsidiary of Phoenix Communications, since 2016. Phoenix is an MSP, offering a wide range of IT/IS services for small to mid-sized business organizations in the mid-south. Phoenix Communications was founded in 1994 in Memphis TN and have since received nationwide recognition for custom designed automation systems.

Jacob has spent the last eight years in network engineering and systems administration, with a focus on cybersecurity and penetration testing in the past four.

He is also heavily focused on threat management, attack simulations and remediation technologies. Jacob's background also includes signal processing and RF design, primarily in the 3GPP and 802.11 domain, which he's now included as part of his ongoing security research.

Organizations are deploying more applications in the cloud, implementing more devices in branch offices and consuming more bandwidth. Traditional connectivity options such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Frame-Relay, Leased Line etc. can be expensive and slow to provision, and provide limited bandwidth in many locations.

Many organizations are looking for an agile connectivity solution for their digital transformation into the cloud era. SDWAN (software defined Wide Area Network) fundamentally creates a secure scalable fabric with the most limited amount of state on the edge device and performs most of the fabric decision making in the controller. This allows organizations to have the flexibility to make topologies as needed, add segments as needed and to be able to deliver into the environment new and old styles of capabilities while maintaining a well-developed routing environment.

Key takeaways:
- The combination of app content, app delivery and app consumption are resulting in an evolving WAN situation

- Challenges such as poor application experiences, increased WAN services spend, and a lack of visibility and control are making it difficult for IT to provide the business with a platform to support faster innovation

- Most IT organizations are interested in realizing a common set of benefits such as consistent high-quality user experiences, reduced cost, simplified operations and lower risk

- The journey to the next generation software defined WAN requires considering various technical capabilities such as transport independence, ubiquitous data plane, automatically secure routed endpoints, resiliency, application aware routing, cloud readiness, simple secure network segmentation, centralized policy enforcement and layer 4-7 flexible services insertion

- Migrating to a software defined WAN does not need to be difficult as long as one knows the best approach to a software-defined WAN environment.

There are many types of storage technologies, both in how they are interconnected, consumed and designed. Object storage is no different in that it brings its own set of unique characteristics to the market. In this webinar, storage experts Rick Vanover and Chris Evans will explain:

•What object storage is and what it does
•How to use object storage
•Essential characteristics of typical consumption
•Why object storage is important to the future of storage and computing technologies

Customer experience is the most powerful and important thing in today’s business from growth and profitability perspective. Everything from start to end revolves around it.

Join this webinar to learn how you can reimagine the customer experience with SAP’s latest offering in this space. Learn about powerful solutions that can help brands build long term competitive differentiation and loyalty through customer experiences that are trusted, simple, personal and connect.

Join this webinar where we will be discussing SD-WAN deployment scenarios along with:
- The current state of “standardisation” of SD-WAN
- Where are the main problem areas for Enterprises and SPs alike, depending on deployment scenarios chosen
- Challenges and solutions for deployments
- Operational issues managing a deployment

Since the initial publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing in 2011, international standards development organizations (SDOs) have sought to refine and expand the cloud computing landscape. This webinar will:

•Identify key published and draft cloud standards
•Discuss their interdependencies
•Highlight their importance
•Identify potential future work.

In addition, related technologies such as virtualization, federation, and fog/edge computing will be addressed. Lastly, the relevance of the standards will be explored to help organizations understand ways these documents can be exploited.

Fibre Channel (FC) SAN workloads are not difficult, but there are several people who do not understand how the workloads line up to appropriate storage protocol and their characteristics. Different workloads have different “Fingerprints,” so to speak. Since FC SANs are block, they work very well with applications that have a lot of transactional data, a lot of random read/write loads, and are particularly good for virtual machine file systems.

This webinar will discuss:
•I/O fingerprints: I/O block sizes & IOPS requirements for various “FC SAN applications”
•An overview of application access patterns, guided by best practices and experience
•How FC fulfills these IOPS requirements and how CPU BW is as important as IOPS

We will briefly investigate application sensitivity to latency, and show how protocol can affect performance.

Smart cities are driving towards Digital Transformation to improve city operations and citizen services. Innovative outdoor Edge technologies deployed on smart streetlights will accelerate that transformation by powering connected sensors and controls, collecting data, managing devices and cybersecurity, local processing, backhaul over wireless networks, and cloud applications for user displays, alerts, reporting and data analytics.
This webinar introduces an Innovative, outdoor Smart City Edge IoT Platform. Installed on a luminaire, the Edge-based platform performs multiple data functions for connected sensors – capture, analysis, aggregation from multiple sensors, and communication – to cloud SaaS applications. In addition, the Edge platform delivers network flexibility, communicating data to the cloud over both wireless smart grid and cellular networks.
Technology factors driving Edge platform adoption and wireless infrastructures for smart city applications will be discussed:
•Improve security
•Speed data analysis
•Reduce the volume of data transmissions
•Lower hardware compute and storage costs
•Edge Analytics
oDiagnostic analysis
oMetrics and measurement for real-time analysis
oData analysis plus Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Real and installed “smart” applications using this technology – urban planning, traffic statistics, bicycle and people counting, road condition monitoring, environmental air quality, power line monitoring, video and audio analytics – and their associated benefits will be highlighted.

Real Time data processing takes key focus in enabling creation of a Digital Twin to conduct what-if studies. An efficient Data Center Lifecycle Management System helps with areas like Alarm Management, Asset Management, Rack Capacity, Rack Cooling Index, Service Level Agreements in order to constantly help modernize the Data Center.
This webinar delves into the modernizing the operations side of Data Center using efficient DCLCM systems.
Key Takeaways: Life Cycle Management, Asset Management, Digital Twin, What if scenarios, Alarms, Rack Cooling Index, Insight to incremental modernization.

Organizations are deploying more applications in the cloud, implementing more devices in branch offices and consuming more bandwidth. Traditional connectivity options such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Frame-Relay, Leased Line etc. can be expensive and slow to provision, and provide limited bandwidth in many locations.

Many organizations are looking for an agile connectivity solution for their digital transformation into the cloud era. SDWAN (software defined Wide Area Network) fundamentally creates a secure scalable fabric with the most limited amount of state on the edge device and performs most of the fabric decision making in the controller. This allows organizations to have the flexibility to make topologies as needed, add segments as needed and to be able to deliver into the environment new and old styles of capabilities while maintaining a well-developed routing environment.

Key takeaways:
- The combination of app content, app delivery and app consumption are resulting in an evolving WAN situation

- Challenges such as poor application experiences, increased WAN services spend, and a lack of visibility and control are making it difficult for IT to provide the business with a platform to support faster innovation

- Most IT organizations are interested in realizing a common set of benefits such as consistent high-quality user experiences, reduced cost, simplified operations and lower risk

- The journey to the next generation software defined WAN requires considering various technical capabilities such as transport independence, ubiquitous data plane, automatically secure routed endpoints, resiliency, application aware routing, cloud readiness, simple secure network segmentation, centralized policy enforcement and layer 4-7 flexible services insertion

- Migrating to a software defined WAN does not need to be difficult as long as one knows the best approach to a software-defined WAN environment.