Archives: Seminar

Innovation and Evolution: BC/DR for Today’s Multi-Cloud Environments

  Presented by Unitrends

We are living in a “Less is More” world. In a landscape that’s rapidly changing, IT professionals are managing more work, projects, and risk than ever before. While external threats such as malware and natural disasters cause significant downtime and data loss without proper BC/DR implementation, organizations must also be prepared to safeguard from within. Data continues to grow at an exponential rate, and not only on-premises. As cloud-delivered solutions such as IaaS and SaaS are rapidly adopted by an increasing number of organizations, and the workforce itself is becoming increasingly dispersed and mobile, organizations must consider data protection strategies to address gaps in BC/DR outside the traditional data center. Join Adam Marget, Technical Specialist from Unitrends, as we explore the evolving landscape of data protection, cloud’s growing role, BC/DR strategies to safeguard local, remote, and cloud-based workloads, and best practices in planning your DR approach.

Gaining Network Visibility with Application Intelligence

  Presented by Gigamon

Come discuss how gaining visibility into your network has become more of a challenge than ever before. With the evolution from the Data Center to Virtual Environments, Public and Private Clouds, our exposure has never been greater.

In this session we will cover Span vs. TAP, Traffic Aggregation, Packet Brokers, Traffic Intelligence, Virtual Environments and how to get that one view of all your data.

Learn how to maximize the ROI on your existing tools while increasing your scope of visibility.

Who knows, you might even have fun?! Heckling Encouraged!

IT Interrupted: Best Practices in Disaster Recovery Planning

  Presented by Zerto

As IT application availability requirements continue to evolve, technology continues change to meet the new requirements.  Join us as we discuss planning considerations for bringing your virtualized workloads into the next generation of IT resilience.  You will learn about data center options to consider as part of your recovery strategy, business and technical trade-offs that will have to be made, capacity planning considerations, and testing approaches to that are possible that will optimize application up-time.

What is HCI and How Does it Enable a Public Cloud On-Prem?

  Presented by Nutanix

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has been taking the IT industry by storm the past 5 years. As businesses are exploring what this means to them, they need to ask themselves should we consider changing our infrastructure? During this session we will cover the following discussions:

  • What is HCI exactly and why consider it?
  • Why are companies moving to the cloud and why are they now moving back?
  • How do I create the Public Cloud experience in my own On-Prem solution?
  • What hypervisors work with HCI solutions?

First Quarter of Containment

  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.

Your Complete Business Communications Solution in the Cloud

  Presented by Mitel & Structured

Are you ready to move communication and collaboration to the cloud with confidence? If so, attend this session to learn how. MiCloud Connect is a full-featured communications and collaboration solution that is easy to deploy and manage. Blend traditional phone system features such as call transferring, extension dialing and more with instant messaging, conferencing, video and screen sharing. This allows you and your team to save time, reduce travel and efficiently collaborate with others. Plus, with the ability to make changes in real time, you can change your call routing or presence on the fly.

State of Alaska IT Transformation

  Presented by Bill Smith • Chief Information Officer, State of Alaska

The State of Alaska is currently engaged in centralization of services and transforming the structure of Information Technology delivery. This presentation will provide insight into the driving factors of transformation, a description of the current state, as well as an overview of future plans.

Bill Smith began his current role as State of Alaska Chief Information Officer in November 2019. In this position, he is responsible for the direction of the Office of information Technology, managing all information technology services and related resources within the executive branch of the State, and providing strategic oversight of the State enterprise systems and infrastructure.

Bill has over 28 years of experience leading teams of all sizes in both the public and private sectors. During his successful career in the United States Army, he was a lead participant in several high-level Headquarters, Department of the Army projects involving operational forecasting, and national force structure. Additionally, he was called upon to direct combat military operations and develop an innovative aviation organization and training program to meet critical Army intelligence collection requirements.

Bill chose to stay in Alaska after he retired from the Army and entered the private sector with a major Alaska-based broadband and communications provider. Over the course of several years, he served in senior product, project and program management roles, covering the spectrum of technology solutions provided to business, consumer, and government agencies in Alaska. In his role as the Senior Manager of Customer Support, Bill redesigned the company’s service assurance manager program to provide improved and deeply engaged customer support to strategic partners.

Bill and his wife Jo have three children and have resided in Alaska for over 13 years.

Vendor Management and Data Privacy

  Presented by AT&T

Among rapidly evolving technological advancements, the emergence of AI-enhanced malware is making cyber-attacks exponentially more dangerous and harder to identify. In the near future, we will begin to see supercharged, AI-powered cyber-attacks leveraged at scale. To protect against Offensive AI attacks, organizations are turning to defensive cyber AI, which can identify and neutralize emerging malicious activity, no matter when, or where, it strikes.

In this session, learn about:

  • Paradigm shifts in the cyber landscape
  • Advancements in offensive AI attack techniques
  • The Immune System Approach to cyber security and defensive, Autonomous Response capabilities
  • Real-world examples of emerging threats that were stopped with Cyber AI

Surviving the Hack!

  Presented by INTERFACE Advisory Council

In 2018, the Mat-Su Borough was the victim of major cyber-attack. In this session, Eric Wyatt, Director, Information Technology & CIO for the Mat-Su Borough will take you behind the hack. He will outline what happened, the response to the attack and how he survived this incident on a professional level. Also, Eric will be joined by several other Alaska IT leaders that were a part of the coordinated response. You will learn key tips on avoiding and detecting these attacks and also find resources that are available you may not be aware of.

Panelists:
Eric Wyatt • Director, Information Technology & CIO, Matanuska-Susitna Borough
Rob Barnett • VP, Information Technology, Olgoonik Development, LLC
Doug Miller • Sr. Management Consultant, Wostmann & Associates
Daniel Monarch • Cyber Security Specialist, Matanuska-Susitna Borough

One Company’s Journey to a Modern Data Center Environment

  Presented by Structured

When the facilities team at a healthcare organization in the Pacific Northwest announced to the IT team that they were undertaking a campus remodel project and they needed the on-prem data center for office space, the IT team quickly sprang into action to find a new home for their DR environment. From learning of this management decision, to performing a due diligence assessment of their ability to use a DRaaS solution, into an RFI and RFP process, and coming to agreement on a contract, this was one of the most rigorous evaluation projects the company has undertaken. This presentation will describe that journey of evaluation and discovery, including the rest of the story which describes the onboarding process and challenges faced along the way. Craig Rhodes is an experienced professional actively engaged with various clients providing Data Center and Program Management consulting services.