Presidential Commission on Cloud Computing: What you need to know

The APAC region reportedly spent $375 billion on Digital Transformation projects in 2019. According to IDC, “The adoption of emerging technologies supporting digital transformation strategies in APAC is shaping up as it’s helping organizations reimagine their businesses, re-evaluate their value chain, reconnect with their customers, and rebuild their organization into a digital native enterprise”.

But with reimagining and reevaluating comes the challenge of navigating what’s currently in place. Nowhere is this more apparent than with technology and legacy systems. For organisations that have been around since before the internet, Digital Transformation has a whole host of extra challenges.

Join this expert panel as they address these challenges, including:

- How the functionality of legacy systems can make it tricky to know when to stick or twist
- How to ensure your Digital Transformation strategy is robust enough to avoid failures and gain competitive advantage
- How to manage the impact of Millennials in the workplace - who expect continuous change and evolution

Speakers:
Ruchir Shastri, President & Founder, SoftSys Hosting (Moderator)
Philip Ng, CEO, BitCyber
Adnyesh Dalpati, Chief Technology Officer, 4 Marketing Technology Venture
Okta, Speaker TBD

Digital transformation has now become an important strategic choice for business and governments to deliver secure and fit for purpose solutions fast. Implementation methodologies like Agile and DevOps are tools in this transformational tool kit. You and your team’s creativity and innovation underpin success, and quality data is the currency that will create trust and unlock delighted customer and citizenry experiences, delivered quickly.

Speed of implementation, ability to pivot and delivery resilience of the teams and the delivery environment have become foundational to how we need to approach delivery. Without a robust delivery chain in the SaaS implementation, you will be vulnerable - it is just a matter of time before the rainy day turns into a perfect storm. Data, data sovereignty and increasing awareness of privacy and social contracting is vital to create trust, and to keep it. SaaS vendors need to be able to respond regardless of set ideas, their economies of scale plans may have to be thought of from a geo-social perspective now also, not just a one-sided business argument. Customers and users vote with clicks and their feet. Ensure you are the on the receiving end of the shopping cart.

Speakers:
Kobus Dippenaar, Director & Digital Transformation Implementer, The Practitioners Limited
Blair Loveday, Co-Founder & Chief People Officer, CultureXP

The current pandemic has forced all organisations to face into the new normal. The survivors are already restarting by adapting to new market opportunities, optimising change and preparing for uncertainty. This dramatic shift has also changed the face of digital transformation (DX).

Learn from industry experts Rod Crowder and Chris Shannon as they guide us through the key learnings from previous events and apply these to reshaping the new face of DX. They will analyse key requirements every market is demanding right now in the search for control, agility and speed.

The presentation will also explore the key success factors for organisations considering changes to their digital strategy and outline why Digital Resilience has become the new currency for strategic transformation.

Discover how the themes of computational storage, persistent memory, and solid state come together in a webcast from the new SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative. We’ll explore how expertise in these three areas can help understand storage architectures, common solution areas, and their impacts on storage devices, systems, and software.

One of the most important aspects of security is how to protect the data that is just “sitting there.” How easy is it to get to? Who can get to it? If someone does get access to the data, can they read it? What are the potential risks of the wrong people reading the data? These are just a few of the questions that we try to answer when we go through the process of securing data.

Contrary to popular belief, however, securing “data at rest” is not simply encrypting the data. While it is true that data encryption plays a major role in securing “data at rest,” there are several other factors that come into play and are equally as important – if not more so.

For this webcast, we’re going to talk about those other factors (Encryption is deserving of its own, specific webcast). We will present the end-to-end process to securing “data at rest,” and discuss all the factors and trade-offs that must be considered, and some of the general risks that need to be mitigated, discussing:

• How requirements for “data at rest” differ from “data in flight”
• Legal and regulatory reasons to protect (or delete) data at rest
• Where and how data could be attacked
• Understanding the costs of ransomware
• How to protect cryptographic keys from malicious actors
• Using key managers to properly manage cryptographic keys
• Strengths and weaknesses of relying on government security recommendations
• The importance of validating data backups... how stable is your media?

Encryption has been used through the ages to protect stored secrets, authenticate messages, communicate secretly in broad daylight, and even to check that messages were properly transmitted and received without tamper. Now, it’s often our first go-to tool for making sure that data simply isn’t readable to prying eyes, ears or AI bots.

But how does encryption actually work, what makes it tick, and how is it managed? How do we ensure compatibility? How do we protect the keys; i.e., “Who will guard the guards themselves?”

It’s a big topic that we’re breaking down into three parts: Encryption 101, Key Management 101, and Applied Cryptography.

Join us on May 20th for the first encryption webcast: Storage Networking Security: Encryption 101 where security experts will cover:

•A brief history of Encryption
•Cryptography basics
•Definition of terms – Entropy, Cipher, Symmetric & Asymmetric Keys, Certificates and Digital signatures, etc.
•Introduction to Key Management

After you watch the webcast, check out the Encryption 101 Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/2ZGMisl

Next-Generation Networking [Ep.5]: The New WAN Economics

Enterprise WAN traffic patterns are shifting. The application mix is changing. And the WAN is becoming core to digital transformation (and to resilience in the post-COVID-19 era).

The two fundamental questions that network and telecom managers must answer right now are these: How much should I be spending on my WAN to achieve measurable success, and what services and solutions deliver the greatest bang for the buck (in terms of quantitative success per dollars invested)?

This webinar shares the findings of the 2020-2021 Next Generation Networks research study and compares a cost analysis of solutions such as:
*WAN Cloud Exchanges (WAN-CX)
* Direct Cloud Connect (DCC)
* MPLS
* Carrier Ethernet
* SD-WAN
* Business and Broadband Internet
* Fiber and wavelength services

We compare the network spend by users of solutions and services from providers such as AT&T, Centurylink, Cisco, Citrix, Comcast, Juniper, Oracle/Talari, VMWare Velocloud, Verizon and others. And we correlate the spend and provider with success overall.

More and more we are seeing compute and inference move to the edge. This is driven by the growth in capability to not only generate data from sensors, devices and by people operating in the field, but also by the interaction between those devices.

This new source of data and information brings with it unique challenges to the way we store and transmit data as well as the way we need to curate it. In this webcast we will look at:
•New patterns generated by the explosion of the Internet of Things
•How IoT is impacting storage and data strategies
•Security and privacy issues and considerations
•How to think about the lifecycle of our information in this new environment

Cost-Benefit Analysis - Workplace Collaboration Series [Ep.3] Contact Center Costs & Provider Ratings

As companies increase their focus on the customer experience, contact centers are front-and-center to any technology decision. Nemertes conducted a study of 564 organizations to gather real-world operational costs and provider ratings. In this webinar, you'll learn:

*How much do companies spend on contact center licensing and IT staff to support the technology?
*Do cloud contact center services cost less to operate than on-premises platforms?
*Which contact center providers deliver the highest-rated customer service, technology, analytics, and more?
*What do companies spend on operational costs, by provider?

You'll be armed with information to make provider and architecture decisions based on costs and ratings from actual customers of contact center providers.