Cloud Computing: Best Practices for Public, Private or No Clouds At All

Fires. Storms. Floods. Attacks. When you think of disasters, you may think of the headlines in the news and the pictures of communities recovering from misfortune. But think for a moment of how much your school depends on its technology and how much smoother the return to normalcy could be after a disaster if you had the peace of mind that your school's data was protected, backed-up and recoverable. That's one less worry.

Join us for Microsoft Azure for Disaster Recovery in Education to learn how to have a strong disaster recovery solution in place in case the worst-case scenario happens. Learn how Microsoft Azure can help you eliminate the need for investment in expensive backup datacenter or hosting-based disaster recovery solutions.

This session will cover how you can:
•Lower traditional cost of operating: roughly 50% cost reduction over most on-premises disaster recovery
•Gain peace of mind: Reliable, offsite, & potentially geo-replicated backup storage
•Benefit from increased uptime: 99.9% availability guaranteed Fast, automatic, testable backups

Plus, learn more about how a disaster recovery plan and assessment by SADA Systems, a Microsoft U.S. Education Cloud Productivity Partner of the Year ensures that your organization is prepared for the unexpected before it’s too late.

Sammamish High School Panel: Bill Palmer, Instructional Technology and Curriculum Coach, Bellevue School District; Gabby Grimstead, Sophomore at Sammamish High School

With budget and resource constraints, school districts like yours are looking for innovative technologies to help manage their computer labs, replace antiquated desktops, and enable BYOD and home access for students and teachers. Rescue Union School District faced the same challenges and designed a strategy with VMware to achieve an available, scalable and cost-effective desktop infrastructure.

Join this webcast to learn how Rescue Union School District is now able to:

Simplify and reduce tech support issues for apps and hardware at remote sites thereby reducing onsite tech staff visits.
Quickly enable flexible, secure learning environments for on-line testing, Labs, mobile, BYOD and remote students and staff.
Easily & affordably implement central management of OS & App upgrades on end user devices, including iOS, zero clients, Chromebooks, laptops, and more in multiple labs and campuses.
Featured Speakers:

Sheila Simmons
Director of Media & Technology
Rescue Union School District

Larry Garcia
Technology Support Specialist
Rescue Union School District

— Leveraging Cradlepoint for the Connected Learning Environment —

The education sector is always looking at new technologies to enhance student learning, increase efficiency, drive down costs, improve safety, and expand services. For K-12 school districts, reliable network connectivity is more important than ever before.

Districts have discovered that 4G LTE networking solutions provide the reliability, affordability, scalability, and security necessary to fit their student-centered goals. From on-campus primary connect and in-vehicle solutions to business continuity and digital signage, schools and students are reaping widespread benefits from the flexibility and constant uptime that 4G LTE provides.

Attendees Will Learn:

• About K-12 IT trends such as off-campus learning, video surveillance, and handling the explosion of mobile devices
• Network security and CIPA compliance for K-12 campuses
• How mobile WiFi solutions for buses and off-campus learning create efficiencies
• About E-rate eligible bundles for Cradlepoint solutions

These days, every aspect of educational development creates digital data. Students, faculty, and staff are continually creating files for assignments, lectures and lesson plans, lab and field research, plus the administrative “paper trail”, challenging you, the IT manager, to secure, protect, and manage the growing data sprawl. Schools are just as susceptible to security breaches as other organizations and must comply with stringent data privacy regulations, all while supporting a diverse and constantly changing user base.

These days, IT managers are challenged with the task of successfully securing, protecting and managing the growing data sprawl across all industries. In this webinar, hear a unique perspective on how digital data affects the educational sector and how it measures against other verticals.

Join guest Mark Lamson, Director of IT at the Westerly, RI public school system, and David Stevens, Technical Marketing Manager at DataGravity, as they explore ways that local school districts, colleges and universities can use automated file and data analysis to reduce complexity and better serve their constituents. You’ll learn strategies to:

•Enhance data compliance and security
•Increase visibility and understanding of your data sets
•Rein in data growth and storage utilization

Continuity responsibility and planning should not be a separate and compartmentalized function performed by independent cells of a few planners in each organization. Organizations must fully integrate continuity into all aspects of an organization’s daily operations, thus creating a “culture of continuity.”

The COOP presentation will provide an understanding of Continuity and Continuity of Operations, explain the importance of a viable Continuity capability, and emphasize the need for a viable Continuity capability in all organizations.

In addition to providing an overview of Continuity of Operations, the COOP presentation will also:

- Educate Federal, State, territorial, tribal, local government jurisdictions, private sector organizations, and emergency management practitioners on the importance of integrating Continuity into daily operations, functions, plans, and mission areas.
- Emphasize the Federal Government’s Policy requiring Federal agencies to be prepared for unpredictable threats such as earthquakes, accidents, sabotage, and terrorism.
- Discuss the importance for State, territorial, tribal, local government jurisdictions, private sector organizations to be prepared for unpredictable disruption of business operations.
- Provide States, territories, tribes, local government jurisdictions, private sector organizations, and businesses with assistance, guidance, knowledge, networking, resources, and tools needed to succeed.

End user computing can really drive down the total cost of ownership (TCO) -- if you take advantage of the virtual desktops. View this video to learn how Horizon 6 can optimize your application delivery and ease of management, while lowering the costs of virtual SAN to truly begin creating your own software-defined data center.

End user computing solves many complex issues in today's fastest-growing industries: Healthcare, financial services, government, education, manufacturing and retail. In today's session, you'll learn about how VMware Horizon 6 address these industries' requirements using customized solutions to minimize risk for customers and accelerate time-to-value.

This webinar details a survey of the top 5 IT infrastructure performance issues in the education vertical. We will share how education institutions can evaluate and evolve their network infrastructure performance and get the most out of their IT applications and assets. Understanding and evaluating your IT environment can have a positive impact on the education environment, which results in a positive experience for educators and students alike. This webinar will also address the benefits of conducting IT infrastructure analytics to identify and solve these issues within your environment.
This will help IT leaders understand their IT environment, get problem and issues under control and help plan for IT change.

This presentation will co-presented by RISC Networks and CDI Computer Dealers Inc.

One of the biggest concerns for IT professionals today is finding a Disaster Recovery plan that isn't going to break the bank. Join this webinar to hear best practices in implementing an affordable and easy-to-use Disaster Recovery option for your VMware production environment and discover the latest technologies that can provide continuous and asynchronous byte-level replication over any distance between your primary and secondary locations.

Learn about free security books for teachers, topics taught in technology classes, topics students like the most, cell phones and drama, and why "the talk" about technology needs to start at home.

A Call to All Teachers -- thanks to Microsoft sponsorship, McCarthy's book Digital Drama is available for free download on Amazon.com (September 24th - 27th) in English and Spanish. Join in on our talk and learn how teachers are using these free resources to educate the next generation workforce.

Linda McCarthy will be talking with Fran Staniec, Technology Teacher, Taft High School, Chicago

Taft High School in Chicago is one of the schools leading the pack by creating lesson plans and teaching their freshmen important safety measures. For example: how to create safe passwords, how to configure a secure Facebook account, antivirus installation and software updating, responsible posting for ALL devices, antibullying, and Internet safety.

Staniec will talk about how they use the free books to create lesson plans and teach Internet safety and security in the classroom. Ask yourself: are your students ready to hit the ground running when it comes to security and entering the professional world?

Looking to remote workstation experiences for employees who need high quality graphics performance, including full multi-monitor and video support?

This webinar will provide you with information on:

- How financial services organizations, schools, media and entertainment and computer aided design/engineering companies can benefit from remote graphics deployments

- How the AMD FirePro™ R5000 remote graphics, featuring the TERA2240, can deliver high quality graphics without compromise, anywhere on the corporate network

- How Florida Atlantic University is able to meet its energy saving goals and deliver a robust computing experience for its students

Benjamin Robbins, Principal, Palador; (moderator)
Vishy Gopalakrishna, VP, SAP;
Ben Smith, Head of Mobil Product, Tribal Labs;
Rob Tiffany, Senior CATM Strategist, Microsoft

BYOD is no longer a consideration, it’s a reality. Every day over 2 million new wireless devices are being activated and these devices will show up on you network. And while most wireless vendors are talking about the potential security risks, which are considerable, almost no one is discussing the impact the sheer numbers of devices will have on your networks performance.

A recent Gartner study did and stated that ‘By 2015, 80% of newly installed wireless networks will be obsolete because of a lack of proper planning’. Many administrators still designing for coverage, when capacity limits are the true Achilles heel of wireless deployments. This session will discuss the varied client types and their capabilities, best practices to address growing device densities and how both impact overall network performance. IT administrator looking at a BYOD deployment or even just a wireless upgrade will gain valuable insight from this presentation.

Perry Correll is a Senior Technologist as well as the Director of Product Marketing at Xirrus. His extensive networking background extends from original Ethernet Thicknet technology, through the switching revolution and now is involved in pushing advancements in Wi-Fi technology to displace wired solutions. Previous roles included technologist and management roles at Cabletron, Xylan and Alcatel.

If Cloud and Virtualization monitoring seem straightforward and not that big a change from what was done a few years ago, think again. These technologies add complexity that requires more than simple monitoring techniques. Join this webinar to learn what complications can arise from these technologies and why everything you ever learned about monitoring needs to be changed.

Desktop Virtualization is the top cloud-based technology impacting End User Computing. And, user-centric, Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management is the primary factor against which cloud-based virtual desktop solutions and providers are and will be evaluated. If you are currently evaluating, planning, or managing application performance in a Virtualized Desktop Environment, don't let your VDI project get derailed by poor end user experience.

In VDI environments, traditional system metrics, such as CPU, memory, and network utilization, are marginal indicators of actual performance. As a result, Desktop Virtualization demands a user-centric vs. device-centric approach to service management. End User Experience (EUE) management becomes an essential barometer to ensure that end-user facing systems are responsive and high-performing. During this webinar, the following topics for ensuring Desktop Virtualization SLAs through a user-centric approach to service management will be covered:

- How to gain comprehensive visibility into exactly how virtualized desktop and remote workstation users are experiencing critical application performance
- How to proactively detect when performance degradations occur
- Methods for correlating PC-over-IP® (PCoIP®) latency with the actual business
transaction response times and the VM image’s health
- How to gain an in-depth understanding of application performance within the VMware View™ environment, exactly as experienced by the users themselves
- Advanced analytics around key PCoIP metrics, such as Image Quality, Round Trip Latency, Packet Lost Percentage, Available Network Bandwidth, and many other performance impacting factors

According to industry researchers nearly 75 percent of the organizations who have deployed a virtual desktop environment have stalled their deployment before completion leaving frustrated employees in departments ranging from IT, to the business units, to the executive suite. It isn’t a lack of good intentions causing these deployments to fail, but rather a lack of understanding of the holistic approach needed to successfully deploy a virtual desktop environment. Join WWT’s Dave Kinsman, National Technical Solutions Architect, as he discusses the 5 Pillars to VDI success.

Find out how teachers, students, and schools can use a free security book, OwnYourSpace: Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online to teach teens effective Internet security in a Q&A with Linda McCarty and Fran Staniec.

Taft High School in Chicago is one of the schools leading the pack by creating lesson plans and teaching their freshmen important safety measures. For example: how to create safe passwords, how to configure a secure Facebook account, Antivirus installation and software updating, responsible posting for ALL devices, Antibullying, and Internet safety.

Staniec will talk about how they use the free Own Your Space books to create lesson plans, learning about security. Ask yourself: are your students ready to hit the ground running when it comes to security and entering the professional world?

Join in learn how to engage students. See you on the 24th!!!

*Any teacher who wants to download the book prior to the webinar can download the book for free at ownyourspace.net

We are on the cusp of important changes in schools today. There is an national effort to update and unify national standards with the Common Core State Standards. With the advent of the tablet, we are finally seeing a computing device with a form factor and price point that opens up important possibilities in classrooms. More importantly, schools must change or face losing millions of students due to a level of disengagement not seen in generations. There are real opportunities out there to bring important ideas up close for kids in ways not previously possible. This talk will review the central issues and highlight specific approaches centered around technology and 21st century skills.