IT Automation: Doing more with more for less!

2013 brought new and exciting ideas to the foreground of the storage industry. From Big Data Storage to Software-Defined Storage discussions raged on how we define them, how we use them and how they will integrate with the enterprise of today. But what will you need to know about next year?

Join this panel of industry thought leaders as they discuss the future of Storage. Discover the latest trends that have been gaining traction throughout the year, what is emerging and what will you need to a adopt in 2014.

The Tech Success Awards are celebrating successful IT projects in the UK. We will unveil the winners of the 2013 edition during this live event presented by Peter Judge, editor of TechWeekEurope UK.

Over half of CIOs said that the complexity of their current ICT estate was the main barrier to cloud adoption. At least according to a recent study published by NTT asking 300 different CIOs about their hurdles to cloud adoption.

However with just 6% of these CIOs saying "no" outright to cloud, and 77% already having some kind of cloud in place, the need is still greater than the hurdles.

So what can you do to help this process, and how can your organisation get around these barriers?

Join this panel of experts as they discuss the realities behind some of these statistics, give general advice for cloud adoption and suggest how to get around some of the barriers, all from and for a CIO's perspective.

Join our expert panel session with top-level speakers from the Cloud Security Alliance, Qualys and TechWeekEurope and get their opinion on what are today's most significant threats in cloud computing.

The panelists will cover how some of the CSA projects on cloud accountability and cloud standardization can help organisations increase their security posture.

With the emergence of new technologies and the consumerisation of IT, businesses have become more productive and more efficient than ever. However, these benefits come at a price, as the list of threats and vulnerabilities to an organisation's network are soaring to an unprecedented level. From financially motivated hackers, hacktivists and state-sponsored espionage to disgruntled employees, the list of threats is extensive. Join this panel to learn from some of the world's leading industry experts on how to keep your network secure.

The benefits of a private cloud are numerous; it’s customizable, scalable, secure and convenient. However, many private cloud projects can fail to reach their potential; be it from unpredictable setup and maintenance costs, blowing a project’s budget out of proportion, incompatibility with your infrastructure caused by an oversaturation of the market or the promise of ‘pre-packaged’ solutions that cannot address your needs.

Join this global panel where industry experts will discuss the pitfalls of private cloud implementation and will suggest:

· Best practices for preparing your current infrastructure for a private cloud project
· Which solution and vendor is right for you?
· How to leverage virtualization for your private cloud

Businesses around the world are observing a constant increase in the amount of employees bringing their own devices to work. The trend has become so significant that the term "BYOD" can no longer be ignored by corporations.

Up until now, businesses debating their BYOD policy have focused on three key aspects: flexibility, convenience and productivity. However, new research goes much further than these simple needs. As we live in a constantly connected world, scientists are discovering distinctive addiction patterns in the brains of device users. There is now evidence that preventing someone from using their device can increase levels of stress and nervousness.

With such strong connections between people and devices, it is impossible to try and resist the BYOD trend. If you can't fight it, how will you secure it?

How do you respond when your organisation has been breached and law enforcement is unable to help?

More and more companies are turning from a reactive response to breaches to a proactive one: preventing a breach before it happens and hacking back. This panel session will feature 4 experts discuss these topics in-depth, from its technical to legal implications.

The data center can be fully virtualized, and the future of software-defined data centers (SDDC) is coming faster than you think. The Software-Defined Data Center is a unified data center platform that will help you transform the way you deliver IT with unprecedented automation, flexibility, and efficiency.

Join our expert panelists while they examine the industry evolution of software-defined data centers and learn how to best identify the needed set of features and understand the concepts that make a software-defined data center truly revolutionary.

Cloud services are provided across the web in a fast and streamlined manner. But that's not a lot of help if the IT staff have to arrange them by phone calls or complex manual interaction. To get the full benefit of cloud services, they should be available through an automatic broker which can ensure that contracts are legal requirements are adhered to, while the actual work done on the cloud can be distributed to multiple service providers.

That needs powerful standards, which will be developed in this panel session.

In this thought-provoking panel session, 4 leading security experts will discuss what they think is the greatest challenge in data security for 2013.

Panelists include:
Peter Judge, UK editor for TechWeekEurope (moderator)
Sarb Sembhi, Director of security consultancy Incoming Thought
Stilianos Vidalis, Lecturer in digital forensics and cyber security at Staffordshire University
David Willson, Attorney at law and owner of Titan Info Sec Group

Following a 40min discussion, the panelists will answer your questions during a live Q&A.

In this insightful webinar the expert panelists will discuss the following topics:
How is the cloud (i.e. weather) impacting your data center?
How is cloud infrastructure impacting your data center?
Where is your data stored now?
Tips on how to protect and manage your data moving forward

Peter Judge, Editor at TechWeek Europe will be moderating this panel session along with:
- Mark Thiele, EVP, Switch
- Gary Thornton, Technical Director, CNet Training
- Edward Haletky, The Virtualization Practice

The Tech Success Awards, running for the first time this year, are celebrating tech creativity in Britain and honouring the IT projects which bring new ideas into the workplace. The finalists will be unveiled in this web event presented by TechWeekEurope Editor, Peter Judge, along with a panel of judges including Ian Osborne from Intellect, Clive Longbottom from Quocirca and Liam Newcombe from Romonet.

Virtualization has created obvious benefits for organizations deploying it. But why stop there? Taking your virtualization projects and expanding them to include a private cloud deployment will result in even greater benefits: scalability, security, agility and more. Join this panel of experts as they discuss common obstacles in moving to a private cloud, how it affects the services you provide and how you can get there in your own infrastructure.

As cloud computing is achieving increased popularity, concerns are being voiced about the security issues introduced through adoption of this new model. The effectiveness and efficiency of traditional protection mechanisms are being reconsidered as the characteristics of this innovative deployment model can differ widely from those of traditional architectures.

Are companies lacking risk awareness? Does sensitive information need safer storage? Are internal clouds inherently secure? Are authentication and authorization robust enough?Join our expert panelists in this live session as they disscuss wich are the security-related issues with cloud computing that are critical to the success and security of a cloud-based project and learn from their experience as they share advice on how to adress them.

BrightTALK’s second annual Cloud Week will cover topics from cloud infrastructure and operations to security, cloud services, governance and compliance. Industry experts will be presenting the latest cloud initiatives and sharing real world case studies. Attendees can expect a mixture of practical content, strategic overview and analysing the most innovative cloud trends.

With all of the hype surrounding "big data," some forget that these large sets of structure and unstructured data sets come with big obstacles. Challenges such as storage, search, sharing and analysis are only a few of the issues that need to be addressed before an organization can truly tap into big data's potential. What is the best approach to store these data sets? Which characteristics should be considered when analyzing? These questions and more will be answered by this panel of experts as they discuss how big data may provide real value or if it all is just a bunch of hype.

Energy efficiency is one of the biggest issues facing a data center industry which is still in its infancy. If you are an enterprise or a medium size businesses, how should you go about eliminating costly waste from your data center - or would it save energy and effort to outsource it to the cloud?

This panel looks at ways to tackle energy management, IT architecture, and the all important people issue.

With everyone talking about cloud storage, you would think it would be the end-all solution for many organizations wanting a better storage strategy for their infrastructure. However, is it a strategy you should be looking at? Join this panel of storage experts as they jump into the cloud to see when cloud storage is worth it and when it isn't.

This presentation will cover topics such as:
- the definition of cloud storage
- security and legal issues
- management problems by incorporating cloud into your storage strategy
- the future of cloud storage and new technologies