Name: Rightsizing the WAN for the Hybrid Workforce
Start: 2021-10-19T10:00:00Z
End: 2021-10-19T10:00:27.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 4.5

The Enterprise Architecture channel  presents the next generation of Enterprise IT: recognizing the strategic importance of digital transformation and the data center to make companies more nimble and competitive. These presentations will help demanding IT and BizOps professionals achieve flexibility, scalability and performance with reduced risk and complexity.

Network infrastructure outages occur due to various factors like natural disasters, intentional attacks, and network failures. These outages are likely to result in the unavailability of critical network elements, impacts on services, and disruption of traffic flows. In order to protect themselves, companies should aim to implement strategies that both enable them to resist and tolerate failure and to recover mission critical communication elements within a business acceptable timescale. However, achieving this whole commitment can become a huge feat, dependent on the scope and age of the infrastructure, engagement with network providers, local distribution across multiple types of connectivity and services as well as the resources and network capacity necessary to manage the organizations “technology estate”.

Companies should ask themselves (as a starter) what strategy they are planning for and how they can best achieve this strategy within their technology structure. 

Tune into this session presented by our business continuity, disaster recovery, cyber resilience and major incident expert Steve Yates as he brings to light tips to redefine network infrastructure strategies in the “new world” as well as areas that companies must consider when considering resources and timescales for restoration of critical network services. Viewers are encouraged to privately share their major concerns in advance if they wish to gain the most from this session.

Viewers will come away from this session with the following takeaways:
- Become aware of common challenges they may encounter. 
- Form an understanding of redefining strategic direction.
- Ensure your organization embraces a joined-up thinking approach when delivering infrastructure resilience.

Redefining Network Infrastructure Strategies: What is the Key?

The advent of AI, deep learning, and GenAI has set the stage for a paradigm shift in the telecommunications industry, promising to revolutionize network automation, customer experience, and workforce efficiency. As we navigate the dynamic landscape of 2024, these technologies are at the forefront of driving innovation, optimizing network performance, and tailoring services to meet the evolving demands of end-users. This comprehensive analysis delves into the foundational principles of AI, deep learning and GenAI, exploring their unique capabilities and practical applications in a B2B context, particularly within highly regulated sectors like telecommunications. 

What participants will learn: 
- Robust understanding of the core concepts of AI, deep learning and GenAI, and how these technologies redefine the capabilities of telecom companies. 
- How GenAI can automate network operations, reduce downtime, and enhance service quality. 
- How AI and GenAI can analyze expansive data sets to improve network quality and tailor services to individual user preferences. 
- How automating repetitive tasks and providing intelligent insights can optimize the telecom workforce, reducing operational costs and fostering business agility. 
- The legal considerations of deploying Gen AI in telecom, ensuring compliance with global regulations.
- How AI and GenAI can be strategically leveraged to enhance network efficiency, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence.
- How GenAI can facilitate the deployment of advanced applications and services, driving innovation and competitive differentiation. 
- The ethical considerations and sustainable practices essential for the responsible deployment of GenAI.
- Risks associated with GenAI and strategies to mitigate these challenges, ensuring secure and unbiased applications. 
- The evolving legal landscape and the importance of specialized legal expertise in successfully navigating Gen AI applications in telecom.

Decoding GenAI for Networks

The ability to connect networks together is the single most important thing to enable digital transformation.  

This session will focus on everything you need to know to streamline your network infrastructure and glean the most data and information from disparate and disconnected networks and devices. Digital transformation involves converting data into useful information and sharing the information between OT and IT. Using advanced connectivity, new automation opportunities  help control and configuration applications to run simultaneously on the same physical wire. 

Learn how to maximize your network and devices running control operations and add new devices without shutting the network down. These new networks allow your printers, video systems, and data analytic applications to co-exist on the same wire as your control system. Using new TSN (time-sensitive networking) technology, we will explore how you can maximize connectivity and disparate networks and disparate devices coexisting for the ultimate interoperability
 
Key takeaways 
- How to maximize the efficiency of all your IT and OT networks, and how you can connect the IT and OT world while sharing data and information seamlessly.
- How to maintain your network in the most efficient fashion and connect your legacy devices and legacy networks to the new network technology in a seamless fashion.
- The importance of data and the multitude of opportunities to get data out of your plant floor and other facility operations, which will enable you to maximize the efficiency of your operations. 
- How you can maintain your assets and add/delete/modify their configuration  to obtain data without impacting the operations of your plant.

Enable Digital Transformation With the Right Network Infrastructure

As IT ecosystems undergo digital transformation, organizations must reassess and reshape existing network architectures. The relentless growth of network traffic, coupled with big data aggregation across multi-cloud environments, renders traditional network models for monitoring and decision-making unaffordable and obsolete.

Traditional network architectures, integrating the control plane and data plane, face challenges tied to the configuration of physical network devices, supported protocols, and accompanying software. The solution lies in AI and ML-powered network architectures, offering intelligent tools for:
- Centralized control
- Increased network scalability
- Clear network visibility
- Improved operational efficiency through automation and intelligence
- Processing vast volumes of data
- Conducting data analytics
- Enhancing security and reducing vulnerability to cyber threats

Join us to learn how to harness the Power of AI and ML, redefining and accommodating the expansion of network architectures.

Leveraging the Power of AI and ML to Redefine and Reshape Network Architectures

In the midst of rapidly advancing technological progress, the rise of digitization and remote work has become a prevailing trend. As a result, critical infrastructures are increasingly susceptible to new risks, continually expanding the realm of cybersecurity threats and attack methods. 

Consequently, organizations are more inclined to entertain the notion of paying ransoms to threat actors. It is imperative for organizations to remain vigilant against these emerging threats to safeguard their systems. The recent proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has given rise to AI-powered cyber-attacks, which are experiencing exponential growth. This development has facilitated cybercriminals in creating sophisticated and innovative malware embedded with new zero-day vulnerabilities. 

AI-powered cyber-attacks leverage machine learning to adapt to evolving defenses and devise novel methods to circumvent them, all while remaining undetected. This enables them to establish an illicit, enduring presence within networks for the purpose of extracting highly sensitive data. 

In order to effectively counter advanced cyber-attacks, organizations must adopt a comprehensive approach and incorporate zero trust principles into their architecture. This involves: 
- Treating every device, node, or entity as a potential threat point. 
- Implementing explicit identification, authentication, and authorization measures. 
- Embracing a default deny model as opposed to a default access model. 
- Developing proactive incident response plans. 
- Providing cybersecurity best practices training for employees. 
- Deploying AI-powered cybersecurity solutions. 

We invite you to engage in thoughtful discourse on these topics, cultivating a clear understanding and exploring strategies for integrating zero trust into your scalable enterprise architecture.

Integrating Zero Trust in a Scalable Enterprise Architecture

While there has been excitement about NIST’s Zero Trust Architecture, many companies are struggling to figure out the right way to go about implementing zero trust. 

Join Jerald Murphy from Nemertes as he discusses one way to approach moving towards zero trust without getting overwhelmed.

How to Develop a Zero Trust Implementation Guide

Ransomware attacks continue to escalate in the enterprise. Analyst groups report that such attacks were occurring every 11 seconds in 2021 with the frequency increasing all the time. Analysts further note mean recovery costs of US$1.82M, median payments of US$400K, and total 2023 ransom payments in excess of US$1 billion. It is a serious threat to the enterprise, and one that is growing every day.

Traditional, single-layer protection mechanisms (i.e., firewall) can be easy to circumvent by clever ransomware tactics (e.g., breaking up the ransomware into pieces and reassembling it once it passes through the firewall). This vendor-agnostic presentation will review the architecture and benefits of a multilayer, collaborate network-to-storage protection architecture that is starting to be implemented by some vendors and will likely become more commonplace going forward.

Defeating Ransomware: Exploring a Collaborative Network-to-Storage Architecture

Achieving network resilience is not just a matter of having the latest ransomware software or firewall technology. Building sustainability, environmental management and green technology into a network infrastructure can help ensure its survival and resilience. 

This session will examine strategies and technologies that not only bolster your network’s green attributes but also enhance its resilience. You’ll also be better prepared for network audits that examine the use of green technology.

Can Sustainability & Green Tech Help You Achieve Network Resilience? Of Course!

Secure access service edge (SASE) revolutionizes network security by integrating cloud-native security technologies like secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network architecture (ZTNA), and firewall as a service (FWaaS) with wide area network (WAN) capabilities. This innovative framework ensures secure connections between users, systems, and endpoints to applications and services, regardless of their location. Introduced by Gartner in 2019, SASE offers enhanced agility, improved network performance, and comprehensive visibility and control across diverse IT environments.

Krishnendu De, the Head of Information Security at CESC Limited, a leading power generation and distribution company in India and former Senior Director of Enterprise Security Services at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), will address the importance of embracing modern inspection and validation techniques in today's fast-paced environment. With remote work on the rise and threats evolving rapidly, traditional methods may impede productivity, compromise security, and disrupt user experience. To maintain efficiency and ensure a smooth user experience, organizations must adopt contemporary approaches tailored to the requirements of remote workers.

In this presentation:  
1.      Discover the advantages of transitioning to a comprehensive SASE framework.
2.      Explore the essential five architectural components that form SASE, along with its various use cases and potential business advantages.
3.      Learn about common misconceptions and implementation hurdles, as well as the best practices for successful SASE integration.
4.      Find out how to select the right SASE provider for your organization's needs.

Enhancing Enterprise Performance and Security through Secure Access Service Edge

Modern products often have a complex web of stakeholder groups across business units and leadership. This makes aligning on a product vision challenging. In this presentation, Amritha Arun Babu, Technical Product Management leader, shares tactics for navigating a complex stakeholder ecosystem including:
- Stakeholder mapping to visualize influence and interest.
- Tailoring messaging and communication styles accordingly.
- Addressing conflicting needs through transparent prioritization.
- Using roadmaps, demos, and events to showcase value.
- Driving consensus with collaborative workshops.
- Empowering stakeholders as product advocates.

Attendees will learn a structured approach to managing diverse stakeholders effectively, gaining buy-in, and resolving conflicts through influence and transparency.

Managing Stakeholders in a Complex Product Ecosystem

The digital landscape is in hyperdrive, demanding an IT metamorphosis that transcends mere tools. Enter AIOps – not just a technological upgrade, but a paradigm shift redefining how we approach IT operations. This presentation delves beyond the nuts and bolts, unveiling AIOps as a revolution that infuses AI's intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes.
Key Themes:
• From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We'll move beyond the "fix it when it breaks" mentality, embracing a shift left, a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously.
• Beyond Siloed Solutions: Embracing Holistic Collaboration:  AIOps fosters seamless integration across departments, applications, and infrastructure, promoting real-time visibility and unified action.
• Automating the process: From Insights to Intelligent Action: Dive into the world of self-healing IT, where AI-powered workflows and automation resolve issues and optimize performance without human intervention.

AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset

Data is one of the most critical resources of our time. Storage for data is always a critical architectural element in any data center. There are considerations for storage: performance, scalability, reliability, etc. A decade ago, the market was aggressively embracing public storage because of its agility and scalability. In the last few years, people are rethinking that approach, moving toward on-premises storage with cloud consumption models. The new cloud native architecture on-premises has the promise of the traditional data center’s security and reliability with cloud agility and scalability. 
Ceph, an enterprise unified SDS, is the perfect solution for this cloud native on-premises architecture. In this webinar, we will describe how Ceph is uniquely qualified to satisfy this architecture and how the technology community is investing to enable the vision of “Ceph, the Linux of Storage Today”.

Ceph: The Linux of Storage Today

What new storage trends are developing in the coming year? What applications and other factors are driving these trends? Learn from this discussion between industry experts Jeff Janukowicz, Research Vice President at IDC; Brian Beeler, Owner and Editor In Chief, StorageReview.com; and Cameron T. Brett, SNIA STA Forum Chair.

This discussion will cover:

·      How are AI and machine learning affecting storage needs?

·      What is the state of the storage industry in 2024?

·      Security concerns being addressed in data storage.

·      EDSFF E1 and E3: should you make the switch?

·      Is SAS dead? What is the role of SAS in the future of storage?

·      How to make data storage sustainable for current and future need.

Hear about applications driving upcoming trends and learn about market data illustrating the assertions. This promises to be a lively session and you don’t want to miss it!

Storage Trends 2024

The latest buzz around generative artificial intelligence (AI) ignores the massive costs to run and power the technology. Without any guard rails in place, what are the impacts of AI on sustainability and costs across our technology resources? This webinar will offer insights on the potentially hidden technical and infrastructure costs associated with generative AI, best practices and potential solutions to be considered, discussing:   

• Scalability considerations for generative AI in enterprises 
• Significant computational requirements and cost for Large Language Model inferencing 
• Fabric requirements and costs 
• Sustainability impacts due to increased power consumption, heat dissipation, and cooling implications 
• AI infrastructure savings - On-prem vs. Cloud
• Practical steps to reduce impact, leveraging existing pre-trained models for specific market domains

Addressing the Hidden Costs of AI

Companies must have both the right tools and processes established at minimum to efficiently develop software.
 
Awareness in software development methodologies (SDM) help software developers choose the best models critical to the project success and the overall efficiency of development teams throughout the software development life cycle. The right approaches ensure the teams work in an organized manner and align the development process with project goals and customer expectations.  

Crafting the right SDM also requires IT leaders to be knowledgeable in:
- Programming paradigms
- Reusable software design
- Principles of construction of stochastic systems
- Relevant mathematical models.
 
Tune into this webinar to learn tips to design the right SDM for your organization so your developers can work in the most efficient manner to produce the highest quality software.

Choose the Best Software Development Methodology for Your Company

Any discussion about storage systems is incomplete without the mention of Throughput, IOPs, and Latency. But what exactly do these terms mean and why are they important?
Collectively, these three terms are often referred to as storage performance metrics. Performance can be defined as the effectiveness of a storage system to address I/O needs of an application or workload. Different application workloads have different I/O patterns, and with that arises different bottlenecks, so there is no “one-size fits all” in storage systems. These storage performance metrics help with storage solution design and selection based on application/workload demands
 In this webinar, we’ll cover:
• What storage performance metrics mean – understanding key terminology nuances
• Why users/storage administrators should care about them
• How these metrics impact application performance 
• Real-world use cases

Everything You Wanted to Know About Throughput, IOPs, and Latency

Las Vegas is notorious as the adult version of Disneyland -- 24/7 gambling, drinking and risqué shows in the Mojave Desert. Others call it the hospitality and conference capital of the world, hosting over 20,000 conferences every year. Yet behind all these disparate impressions of Sin City and the entertainment capital of the world, is a united and earnest effort among major publicly listed and Las Vegas-based companies to achieve sustainability goals and meet ESG targets while providing exceptional service to the over 40 million annual visitors and over 2 million residents who call the Las Vegas Valley home. 

In this presentation, long-time Las Vegas resident and hospitality professional Ralph Villanueva will talk about the ESG efforts of select companies based in his backyard, and what lessons can be leveraged by the audience to build a sustainable company in general and IT ecosystem in particular.

Going Green in the Desert: Lessons from ESG Initiatives in Las Vegas

Workloads using generative artificial intelligence trained on large language models are frequently throttled by insufficient resources (e.g., memory, storage, compute, or network dataflow bottlenecks). If not identified and addressed, these dataflow bottlenecks can constrain Gen AI application performance well below optimal levels. 

Given the compelling uses across natural language processing (NLP), video analytics, document resource development, image processing, image generation, and text generation, being able to run these workloads efficiently has become critical to many IT and industry segments. The resources that contribute to generative AI performance and efficiency include CPUs, DPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, plus memory and storage controllers.  

This webinar, with a broad cross-section of industry veterans, provides insight into the following:

• Defining the Gen AI dataflow bottlenecks
• Tools and methods for identifying acceleration options
• Matchmaking the right xPU solution to the target Gen AI workload(s)
• Optimizing the network to support acceleration options
• Moving data closer to processing, or processing closer to data
• The role of the software stack in determining Gen AI performance

Accelerating Generative AI – Options for Conquering the Dataflow Bottlenecks

Virtual Reality and the Hybrid Workplace

Force Majeure: Re-Imagining the Post-Pandemic Office

Hybrid Happiness: How technology can ensure you continue to thrive post-pandemic

Flexible Security Components for SASE

Optimizing Remote Employee Collaboration

Improving the Remote Worker Experience While Balancing Security

The story of PwC's human-led and tech-powered response to the pandemic

Building a Cloud Architecture for the Hybrid Workforce

Moving Beyond All-or-Nothing Security

End User Security Awareness & Culture Change in Hybrid Enterprises

Securing the Hybrid Workforce: How to Establish Trust in a Zero Trust World

Hacking and Hardening without Perimeters

Post-Pandemic Pain Points for Professional Protectors

What Your Board and C-suite Needs to Secure the Post-pandemic Workforce

The Role of SD-WAN, SASE and Multi-Cloud Networks in a Work From Anywhere Future

Merge Security and Networking or Close Your Business

Zero Trust Network Access: Balancing Risk and Workplace Flexibility

SASE 101

Remote Network Access for the Hybrid Workforce

How to compare SD WAN vendors?

Leveraging New Technologies for the Post-Pandemic Workfo

Remote work is likely to continue and become integrated into corporate life across many industries. What will that look like in reality? What are the ramifications for securing and architecting the underlay? This talk will explore insights on how network professionals are approaching SASE/ZTS strategies in their networks from TeleGeography's WAN Manager Survey. We will then use that as background for examining different underlay configurations to maximize network performance and cost savings in the hybrid work era.  

Topics this presentation will cover:  

• How are real WAN managers currently approaching SASE/ZTS?  
• What are the greatest challenges with adopting SASE/ZTS in a brownfield environment? 
• How is the mix of enterprise access products changing? Are MPLS and DIA prices converging?  
• How does the TCO for an SD-WAN enabled network change based on the underlay products and bandwidth?

Rightsizing the WAN for the Hybrid Workforce

Access Management

Enterprise Architecture

MPLS

Network Architecture

Network Based Applications

SASE

SD WAN

Total Cost of Ownership

Wide Area Network

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infrastructure and creating software-defined data center components. However, it can also complicate your infrastructure. Join this active community to learn best
practices for avoiding virtual machine sprawl and other common virtualization pitfalls as well as how you can make the most of your virtualization environment.

Virtualization

Cloud computing has exploded over the past few years, delivering a previously unimagined level of workplace mobility and flexibility. The cloud computing community on BrightTALK is made up of thousands of engaged professionals learning from the latest cloud computing research and resources. Join the community to expand your cloud computing knowledge and have your questions answered in live sessions with industry experts and vendor representatives.

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Data Center Management

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Rightsizing the WAN for the Hybrid Workforce

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