BWG Reimagine Cloud Adoption Summit encourages senior professionals to share & network with like-minded industry peers. Each session will be moderated by a BWG Connect professional to ensure that our panel sessions remain on topic and answer critical questions that the audience truly cares about.

All audience members will have the ability to ask live questions and will have access to introductions to any of the panelists following the event. We're always open to making connections to others within our network as well. Come join the BWG Community!

BWG Connect & our Event Sponsors are proud to host this virtual half-day forum in order to provide as much educational information as possible.

As always, there will be no sales pitches and there is no cost to join.

12:00pm - 12:50pm

Addressing the Tech Skills Gaps

• Cloud migration requires not just a technology strategy; however, a people, skill set, and organizational process change strategy.
• Align your technology costs directly with usage -- all while allowing your development teams to focus on product delivery and bringing new products to market.
• There are cost implications in a do-it yourself approach, especially regarding staff time spent in workload refactoring and having to manage separate teams for on prem and cloud workloads.
• Reducing IT staff workloads through automated deployment of IT infrastructure – what does that look like?
• Employee innovation initiatives: training, development programs, team structures, hybrid workplace and new processes.
• Up-skilling and reskilling your team: ongoing education and employee guided curriculums.

1:00pm - 1:50pm

How to Get Faster Time to Value and Improved Business Agility

• Today’s organizations must operate in a more agile environment to support modern business initiatives. Embracing and enabling hybrid and multi-cloud strategies -- yet continuing to support legacy applications.
• Vendor/technology analysis and decision-making can take a lot of time - and add-in managing supply-chain issues.
• System availability and lead times have never been worse. It can take 3-6 months to receive products, when historically IT worked in a just-in-time paradigm.
• Current backdrop on product availability - across storage, network, and compute; feedback on the experiences of specific companies and how are infrastructure teams managing the current environment.
• How are Bare Metal Service Providers in better positions to procure equipment?
• How to get up and running faster than DIY and avoid up-front capital expenses / operational expenses.
  • The automation of provisioning tasks, investment protection and efficiency savings.
• Alignment to Sustainability Initiatives.

2:00pm - 2:50pm

Data Security Challenges in a Hybrid Cloud World

• Data storage can also be a liability if left unprotected. Without an adequate data protection policy, sensitive information could fall into unwelcome hands or breach regulatory requirements. What are the priorities companies are implementing to secure their data?
• Data loss prevention (DLP)—deals with making sure that end users do not send sensitive or critical information outside the business network. It also gives the network administrator the tools to control what data end users can transfer. Data loss prevention works by monitoring all data currently flowing through the business network, identifying sensitive information, and preventing it to fall into the wrong hands.
• Cloud storage security—provides control over how data can be moved to and from the cloud, ensuring that data access is limited to authorized parties only.
• Encryption—data encryption technology encrypts data on a hard disk drive to protect it from theft. It prevents unauthorized people from using this data, even when it falls into their hands. Data should be encrypted both in transit and at rest in the storage systems. Encryption tools also provide a secure key management system for tracking encryption keys.
• Access controls—regulate who or what can view or use resources in your computing environment. It works by identifying an individual or entity, verifying that any person or application trying to access any data is what it claims to be. Access control systems perform identification, authentication and authorization of users and entities by evaluating required login credentials that can include passwords, Personal Identification Numbers (PINs), biometric scans and security tokens.
• Secure storage and backup

3:00pm - 4:00pm

Reimagine Cloud Adoption and The Evolving Data Center – The Journey to Business Outcomes

• The impact of volatility in the macro-environment on cloud adoption - economic uncertainty from rising interest rates and inflation; the war in Ukraine; and labor disruption from work-from-home and scarce skilled labor.
• The outlook for the adoption of cloud services – consider: the desire for utility pricing and flexibility of opex; the lack of skilled labor; and against the backdrop of increasing and unpredictable costs.
• The imperatives of rapid and agile development. The need to accelerate the speed of application delivery.
• Total cost and forecasting costs of cloud services - real-world stories of the cost of public, hybrid, and managed cloud services. Costs adjusting for resilience and scale. Strategies and success of implementing cost controls.
• The reality of implementing and running hybrid environments, mixing on-premise and cloud services, across applications, databases and regions.
• Bare Metal as a Service – solution for customers who want to get out of their datacenters. A simple, on-demand full-stack—network, storage, compute—hosted, deployment, and support from a single vendor, under one contract to reduce complexity.