Executive Keynote Presentation: Making Security Popular
Anne Scrivener Agee, Vice Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer,

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Morning Panel Discussion: Funding Your IT Roadmap

Data Center Operations: Reducing Total Cost of Ownership

 Data Center Disaster Recovery

Paul Dattoli,
IT DR Coordinator, Partners Healthcare

Application Delivery: Adding Scalability and Flexibility While Reducing Costs

Paul Nicholson,
Senior Product Marketing Manager,
A10 Networks

Discussing the Top 25 Problems Lurking in Your Network Today

Tim Connelly,
Director, Systems Engineers,
Netcordia

Getting Buy-In for Proper Security

Anne Scrivener Agee, Vice Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer,
University of Massachusetts, Boston

Cloud Computing Security: Solving the Five Most Common Problems With Application Intelligence

David Buckwald,
Director of Engineering,
SonicWALL

Abstracts

Cloud Computing and Virtualization: How the Global 2000 Are Evolving Their IT Infrastructure
Ken Male, Executive Vice Chairman and Founder, TheInfoPro

How are the Global 2000 transforming their IT infrastructure?  How is virtualization a key building block in the transformation?  What lessons are they learning?  In this session TheInfoPro’s Ken Male will present findings from thousands of one-on-one interviews with Global 2000 IT decision makers.  You’ll learn how they are employing internal and external cloud architectures -- and find out how virtualization is playing a key role in the evolution.

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Managing, Controlling and Optimizing Application Delivery
Jim Metzler, Network World Columnist; President, Ashton Metzler & Associates

It was only a few years ago that IT organizations began to systematically focus on ensuring acceptable application delivery.  They did so by deploying a first generation of solutions that were intended to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload from servers computationally intensive processing such as TCP termination and multiplexing, and to provide visibility into the performance of applications.  While these solutions continue to play an important role, additional challenges – and solutions – are emerging to deal with the issues raised by server, desktop and storage virtualization as well as public and private cloud computing. In this session, you’ll understand some of the new and long-standing application  delivery challenges -- and how to apply contemporary strategies and solutions to your best advantage.

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Securing Against the Evolving Threat Landscape
Andreas Antonopoulos, Network World Columnist; Senior Vice President and Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

In their constant arms race with cyber-criminals, security professionals must refresh and broaden their knowledge. New technologies and applications—cloud computing, social computing, rich internet applications and collaboration—make that a constant and growing challenge.  Continuing changes in building and delivering applications demand new security strategies, architectures and technologies, forcing us to re-evaluate everything we knew about security: perimeter defenses, defense-in-depth, compliance and audit. What are your most critical assets? Where do you apply security devices and controls? How do you manage risk and without sacrificing agility? 

This session provides actionable guidance on how best to protect critical assets in the face of ever-increasing threats. Beyond exploring security trends and best practices, it lays out a critical roadmap to refocused, improved security for enterprises facing rising compliance burdens while increasingly mixing in-house and outsourced services, federating with partners and suppliers, and providing ever greater access and services to users.

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Crucial Intersection: IT Converges Applications, Services, & Infrastructure to Support the Distributed Enterprise
Robin Gareiss, Network World Columnist; Executive Vice President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

The convergence of all types of traffic over wireless and wireline infrastructure is vital to improving competitiveness. A growing virtual workforce requires access to data and applications in central data centers. Ballooning demand for high-speed voice, data, and multimedia applications available to any device at any location increase the need for a robust network.  IT, networking, and applications teams must, therefore, provide a reliable, robust communications infrastructure, supporting a variety of integrated applications, including voice, high-definition video, Web conferencing, streaming media, text messaging, Web 2.0, and more.

This session will provide best practices recommendations to answer: Which WAN, wireless, and mobile technologies make the most sense for your organization? What should be in your branch and mobility strategies? What unified communications and collaboration architectures should you deploy? How difficult is integration among vendors? When should you rely upon managed service providers? Learn how to architect and implement effective converged communications for your organization.

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Architecting for Data Center Agility
Johna Till Johnson, Network World Columnist; President & Senior Founding Partner, Nemertes Research

Business needs and technological advances pull the data center in more directions all the time, and require it to change directions quickly and cleanly. To meet these challenges, IT must reassess and re-imagine its data center strategies. By making wise and flexible use of the spectrum of sourcing options available, from do-it-yourself to infrastructure-as-a-service, IT must put agility, risk management, and cost management at the center of its thinking about how to provision and deliver services. 

This session will explore current trends in data centers, examine how enterprises should make choices about sourcing, and discuss the roadmap for re-architecting the in-house data center in ways that allow it to scale services up or down on the fly, to waste fewer resources (power, space, human), and to turn on a dime to pursue new opportunities or abandon failed strategies.

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Making Security Popular

Anne Scrivener Agee, Vice Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Nearly 2 years ago, the IT team at the University of Massachusetts at Boston created an information security council with the idea that individual business units should share some responsibility for protecting their own data. Now, various stake-holders are practically begging to participate.  Anne Scrivener Agee will detail how the group has been able to raise awareness, set policy and get buy-in for security initiatives – and the practical effect it has had on day to day security at the university.

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Data Center Disaster Recovery
Paul Dattoli, IT DR Coordinator, Partners Healthcare

Partners Healthcare operates data centers used by leading Boston hospitals including Mass General, Brigham and Women’s and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.  Given that, the stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to data reliability and availability.  Paul Dattoli will explain the technology and processes in place to ensure recovery of critical systems in the event of a disaster in one of its data centers – so that healthcare professionals always have access to the data they need, when they need it.

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Rethinking Everything
Curtis Edge, CIO, The First Church of Christ, Scientist and the Christian Science Publishing Society

From its traditional Windows-based desktops and internally provided email to Oracle Financials, the Christian Science Publishing Society is taking a fresh look at what services it really needs to provide and how it should provide them. For some applications, it is lookng to cloud-based providers. For others, such as desktops, it wants to use virtualization technology to enable users to employ the desktop device of their choosing – perhaps even one they own.  Curtis Edge will explain the thinking behind his plan, the results thus far and why he expects it will enable a more nimble IT organization, able to more easily scale up as well as down.

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Protecting PII in an Open Environment
Esmond Kane, Information Security Specialist, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

In an educational instituation, it can be tricky to balance the need to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) vs. the principles of academic freedom and an abundance of research data. In Massachusetts, the issue is all the more pressing with the recent implementation of a new law protecting PII.  Yet users are typically unaware of the PII they store or of the risks this data presents. Esmond Kane will discuss how the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences is addressing the issue.

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Optimizing for Global Performance
Alec Polnarev, Head of Systems and Networking Engineering, GMO

As a financial services provider with 500 employees spread among locations in Boston, Singapore, Sydney, Zurich and the UK, GMO is challenged to provide all those employees with the optimum application performance they need. As Alec Polnarev will explain, the company does so largely by using a combination of application virtualization and WAN optimization, a duo that has proven to be successful at keeping users happy and productive.

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Devising a Winning UC Strategy
Joshua Sigel, VP of IT Operations and Applied Technologies, UNFI

With 6,500 employees spread throughout the U.S., effective communications has always been a challenge for UNFI, a national distrubtor of organic and specialty foods. To address the issue, the company has been aggressively pursuing unified communications and has implemented applications ranging from presence and chat to unified messaging and IP video. Joshua Sigel will explain not only what UC has done for his company, but what it takes to get started with the technology, including the essential underpinnings that must be in place and how to sell the concept to the business.

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