Archives: Seminar

Find Your Balance in the Cloud

  Presented by Quest Software

Feel like you’re performing a high-wire balancing act in your role as IT Manager or Infrastructure Admin? Performance monitoring and capacity planning can be a real challenge, regardless of your infrastructure design. You’ve got to decide what compute and storage resources are needed and predict when they’ll be needed. You’ve also got to balance the competing priorities of staying within budget and providing acceptable service levels to users. But these days you’re no longer simply managing an on-premises data center, you’ve also got to figure out which workloads to move to the cloud, how best to get them there, and how to manage them in the cloud for the long term.

With all this increased complexity, comes the need for more robust performance monitoring tools to help you manage your hybrid environment and give you the means to resolve issues quickly. Finding the right solution can even help simplify the planning and execution of your cloud migration. Come join Quest to learn more.

Building A Security Culture in a Customer Service World

  Presented by Dan Hammerling • Chief Information Security Officer, Peppermill Casinos, Inc.

Whether we like it or not, all IT positions are involved with customer service. At the same time, the changing nature of cybersecurity and external regulations has necessitated that we consider business opportunities in light of the security and privacy risks. Through relationship building with key decisionmakers and providing continuous training to all members of an organizational team, we can work to make security a foundational element of our business operations.

H. Daniel Hammerling is an accomplished IT Security leader and US military veteran. He brings over 20 years of IT and IT Security experience to his current role with Peppermill Casinos Inc. Dan holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business management as well as a CISSP and CISM. Among his volunteer work and family life, Dan is a member of ISACA, (ISC)2, ASIS International, InfraGard, and the USSS-ECTF. In his most recent endeavor, Dan has become a content creator and twitch streamer.

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