Archives: Seminar

Adapting and Implementing the New Normal for Education

  Presented by Ardham & Extreme Networks

Education Institutions and staff are rapidly preparing their organizations for success in a changed world. As they continue to drive towards digital transformation this global pandemic heightened these unique IT challenges into full force. Continuing to focus on their main challenges; some have been re-prioritized to accommodate remote learning to drive better learning outcomes.

Join our interactive session to see a showcase of key approaches and ideas in the education industry, plus the critical building blocks, to help advance your own IT response.

  • Key considerations for the new normal – technology and education trends.
  • A showcase of strategies and best practices from some of the leaders in the education industry.
  • How Education IT departments are coping with and adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • How Teachers and Staff are evolving their classrooms into remote learning environments and still continue to drive better learning outcomes.
  • Best Practices for Remote and Online Learning.
  • Facilitating agile environments, by delivering simple and secure remote and extended connectivity, with centralized IT control.
  • How to better enable contact tracing and occupancy management with ubiquitous, real-time location analytics and long-term data horizons.

Why Every Business Needs a Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Strategy

  Presented by Veeam

Today’s applications and data sets are larger, more complex, distributed and interdependent than ever. While many have a disaster recovery plan in place, executing, testing and documenting these plans is often complex and cumbersome.

We’ll also discuss:

  • State of BCDR today and what hinders DR planning for most companies
  • Why backup strategy is not DR strategy
  • Democratized DR of today (how tedious, manual procedures can be completely automated, and at accessible cost)

SD-WAN Edge Transformation for the Cloud-First Enterprise

  Presented by Silver Peak

As cloud adoption and SD-WAN innovation hastens, global enterprises are transforming how they build and secure wide area networks. Leveraging automation, enterprises can deploy, connect and secure hundreds of sites per week, a feat not possible with a traditional device-centric approach.

During this session, we’ll discuss how the unification of SD-WAN, WAN optimization, routing and security in a single, centrally orchestrated platform:

  • Delivers superior application performance wherever apps are hosted
  • Increases the quality of experience for end users and for IT
  • Simplifies branch WAN edge architecture

What’s Next?

  Presented by Mike Baca • Chief Information Officer, New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department

Interesting developments, new approaches to old problems, new paradigms of doing business, even the talent pool is changing. 2020 presented a huge catalyst for transformation and we can see the customer experience, and our professional lives, will dramatically change forever. Government institutions are choosing to keep up with the industry leaders, and in many ways are laying the groundwork and spearheading the lasting evolution.

As the CIO for both the NM Motor vehicle and Tax Department, Mike will share an interesting cross jurisdictional perspective that demonstrates the convergence of technology with new ways of performing. We are going places faster than we ever dreamed possible. Join us for an exciting look at “What’s next?”

Mike Baca is the CIO for New Mexico’s Taxation and Revenue Department (TRD) and has over 25 years of experience in information technology. Prior to joining the TRD, Mike was the Director of the New Mexico Department of Information Technology Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO). While building NM’s EPMO, Mike worked directly with NM CIO’s focusing on legislative policy, technology budgeting, and ensuring successful enterprise project implementation (we went from huge failures to an 87% success rate – on time, on budget, complete adoption). Other significant milestones include the passage of legislation consolidating technology in NM under the Department of Information Technology, NM’s Sunshine laws, and a long history of successful business case and technology appropriations. Mike also has background data analytics.

Mike is many things – poet, painter, teacher, vegetarian cowboy, the Director of NM’s EPMO, and most recently the CIO for New Mexico’s Taxation and Revenue Department and Motor Vehicle Division.  His background includes holistic data mining, rescuing endangered IT projects, and organizational transformation. On the personal side he loves chocolate chip cookies, motorcycles, and libraries.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

  Presented by Trend Micro

As the global threat landscape continues grow and evolve, security tool sprawl is a common concern among many organizations. These tools are generating an overwhelming amount of data that lacks context and is not immediately actionable. While many modern security solutions have some built in integration functionality or API capabilities for integration into the larger security tools footprint, many require some sort of “glue” in order to build a cohesive cross-platform detection and response strategy. This presentation will highlight the importance of developing an Extended Detection and Response (XDR) strategy that utilizes all of that valuable data and gets your organization to remediation quickly and confidently.

Work from Anywhere: The New Norm For Public Sector

  Presented by Nutanix

As we have seen in 2020, many companies are working to enable their employees to have a work from home capability. However, there are many factors that contribute to whether that will be possible or not. Are their apps supported? What devices are supported? How secure will they be? What latency issues will they incur and where is the data locality?

All of these topics and more will be addressed.

Enduring from Home: COVID-19’s Impact on Business Security

  Presented by Malwarebytes

All of us are living in the new Work from Home normal caused by the rapid transmission and spread of COVID-19. While people everywhere have been worried about stopping the spread of COVID, malicious threats have not only continued to propagate but they have exploded in new and interesting ways. During this presentation we will review some of the more creative ways hackers have targeted business and individuals during the age of Work from Home and some ways to protect yourself from them.

CI/CD for Networking: Adopting DevOps Principles for a More Robust Network

  Presented by Infoblox

In recent years, continuous integration and continuous deployment, aka CI/CD, have become de facto standards for DevOps-minded software development organizations. Adoption of CI/CD enables software architects and IT specialists to create more flexible, secure and agile infrastructure with new features and functionality that are continually improved and deployed. While compute and storage aspects of environments have benefited greatly from CI/CD, network infrastructure has lagged behind.

This presentation pulls back the covers on efforts taking place to bring CI/CD philosophies to the work of revamping legacy, monolithic network architectures using cloud-native principles, microservices and containerization. The end goal is to create networks that are inherently more adaptable, scalable, automated and simpler to manage.

Speaker Bio: Glenn Sullivan is a Principal Product Manager for Emerging Technologies at Infoblox and joined the Infoblox team when SnapRoute, a company he co-founded in 2015, was acquired by Infoblox. At SnapRoute, Sullivan was responsible for product direction by advocating for the end-user. Prior to founding SnapRoute, Sullivan was responsible for building out hyperscale data center environments at Apple. In addition to core network operational functions, Sullivan led efforts to automate the lifecycle management of various platforms in a multivendor environment. Before Apple, Sullivan was a specialist support engineer on the LAN Switching team in Cisco TAC. While there, his specialty was in turning around customer sentiment by focusing on escalated issues and transforming the customer experience into a positive one. Sullivan has a BS in Network and Systems Administration from RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology).

Automating the Analyst

  Presented by Darktrace

Alongside the rise of today’s dynamic workforce, the speed and scale of sophisticated cyber-attacks is rapidly increasing. As the cybersecurity industry continues to endure an ongoing skills shortage, over-worked and under-resourced teams urgently need augmentation in order to defend against evolving, sophisticated threats.

For over three years, Darktrace experts have been working to meet this challenge, investigating whether they could teach AI to think like a cybersecurity analyst. It takes subtle, nuanced skills and implicit knowledge for an analyst to detect genuinely threatening activity, and the creation of the world-first Cyber AI Analyst took analyzing over one hundred of the world’s top threat analysts and complex machine learning algorithms.