Setting the agenda for European IT professionals

2013 is a pivotal year for European organisations as they accept that embedding IT solutions at the heart of their operations has to be one of their key strategies to help them accelerate out of the longest recession any of them can remember.

As we start to see the early shoots of economic growth in many countries across Europe the timing couldn’t be more appropriate for IT professionals to show their expertise and command of new technologies and IT practices to help advance the growth and sustainability of Europe’s re-emergence as the world’s strongest economic region.

This challenge to Europe’s IT professionals comes at a period of unparalleled change in the industry with the confluence of new technologies, delivery methods and service models. Having a firm understanding of all these evolving IT opportunities will be fundamental to delivering the right IT solutions to enable organisations to prosper in the more dynamic information led economy of the future.

With an understanding of the challenges the IT professional now faces and the criticality of the timing of being able to deliver these new solutions the organisers of Powering the Cloud 2013 have evolved the format of this year’s event to give Europe’s top IT professionals an agenda that addresses the major issues they are facing with the opportunity to debate and challenge ideas put forward by industry experts, analysts and technology gurus.

Powering the Cloud 2013 will still include the popular keynote speaker sessions, vendor updates, customer case studies and emerging technology presentations but a major focus this year will on our Spotlight Sessions. These were introduced last year to bring specific focus on topics that were fundamental to the CIO and other IT professionals in helping them see past technology hype.

Having listened to the positive feedback from delegates last year and taken note of their ideas this year’s Spotlight Sessions will have a much tighter format with shorter subject based presentations followed by Q&A and more structured panel sessions. The objective will be that delegates will get a deep understanding of the issues they face, the opportunities available to them and examples of ways forward with experience, where appropriate, from real world deployments.

These thought leadership Spotlight Sessions will address five main topics this year: big data, data security, running enterprise class and Tier 1 applications in datacenter and Cloud environments, dynamic infrastructure management and rethinking the datacenter architecture.

Powering the Cloud 2013 will be the agenda setting event for all of Europe’s IT professionals. Whether you have the heavy decision making responsibility of a CIO or as a technology specialist the need to be abreast of the latest developments there will be content that will be interesting, challenging and provoking. Most importantly there will be opportunities to debate issues that are most important to you.

Over the next few months it will be my responsibility to put together an array of speakers and panellists to entertain, challenge and inform you. Most importantly my aim will be to create a dynamic atmosphere across the event where our sponsors and event partners engage with you both at an intellectual and practical level.

Powering the Cloud 2013 is the must attend event for Europe’s IT professionals who want to be leaders within their organisations.

I look forward to meeting you at Powering the Cloud 2013. Register to attend now at www.poweringthecloud.com

Rethinking your Data Center Architecture

Most organisations have gone through some sort of data center refresh over the last few years implementing Virtualised architectures, creating more application aware and responsive networks and enhancing storage arrays to cater for the increased volume and variety of data.

However the pace of change is accelerating with the need not only to support Big Data & Analytics applications but also a whole variety of real time and mobile applications. So maybe, rather than implementing data center upgrades in a ‘piecemeal’ fashion, it is time to rethink the whole of the data center in a more holistic manner.

With this in mind one of our Spotlight Sessions at this year’s ‘Powering the Cloud’ event will look at the driving forces behind this need and what are the possible scenarios that a CIO needs to understand.

In the first session we will explore the role of the data center in this new IT world and how it is changing at an ever increasing pace. In particular this session will address the need to support more dynamic and varied business applications, cater for huge increases in data, support a diverse range of users and ensure security and performance.

In the second session we will look at some of the innovative storage, virtualisation, networking and security solutions that enable the data center manager to meet the challenges of this interactive, multimedia and mobile IT world.

In particular we will look at how hardware and software vendors are continually striving to provide ‘best of breed’ solutions to meet the complex needs of the modern data center. Some of these solutions are trying to address the broader issues the data center manager now faces and others are focused on a particular problem.

Having looked at ‘best of breed’ solutions, in our final session, we will turn our attention to the case for ‘Convergence’ in the data center.

Convergence is being driven by the need to move away from the ‘siloed’ architecture of past data centers and deliver a more flexible, responsive, scalable and cost effective solution.

Virtualisation and the ability to provision processing and storage ‘on-the-fly’ has been the catalyst behind the move to convergence. However are there any pitfalls to avoid from going the converged architecture route.

In this session we will explore the benefits and potential dangers of convergence and debate the issues that are raised. Within the overall theme we will also address some of the ‘green issues’ and the rise in popularity of modular or containerized solutions.

The objective of these sessions, which will be made up of presentations and panel debates by industry analysts, sponsor spokespersons and data center managers, will be to explore all the issues surrounding the role of the data center, possible scenarios for future architectures and most importantly give delegates ideas that they can go back and implement in their own data centers.

Securing your data

The role of security in a connected world

Data that companies acquire, manage and secure today is much different to what it was even a couple of years ago. The variety, volume and complexity of customer and internal data held is placing new demands on CIOs both from a pure manageability front but also from external compliance and regulatory requirements.

Securing this data used to be purely an issue of its integrity and availability. Good backup and recovery, disaster recovery and business continuity plans were enough to satisfy the needs of the organisation. However in a world with mass connectivity, on-line transaction processing and social media information gathering, the security priorities and rules have changed.

Now organisations cannot just set their own data security policies. The EU, national governments, industry regulators and individuals all have a say in what information can be held, where it can be located, how it must be secured, who has access and what can be done with the data.

At this year’s Powering the Cloud event the whole subject of data security will be addressed in one of our major Spotlight Sessions.

One of the main topics that will be addressed within the session will be the European Commission's ‘proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation’ which represents almost certainly the most significant development since the EU Data Protection Directive.

Where the directive was interpreted and implemented at a national government level this proposal is an EU regulation and as such will be applicable in all member states, without the need for national implementing legislation.

The proposed regulation is that companies should have only one regulatory authority that supervises its activities across all EU member states. At face value this sounds great but already there is dissention from consumer activists and global companies and it emerged recently that US regulations on data security mean that data held on US territories or by US companies globally can be accessed by the US government for national security reasons.

Not sure how Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure can sell this to European companies but that amongst many other issues of legislation, including PCI compliance, will be discussed and debated in this Spotlight Session.

As just mentioned when data starts to exist in the Cloud its security becomes a major issue for everyone. Leaving aside the international regulations that are coming into effect, there are many other data security challenges that the Cloud brings to the fore such as data isolation, integrity, availability, compliance and privacy.

During the session we will address all these issues and explore the contentious notion put forward by many Cloud providers that they have implemented better security than most Enterprise IT departments deploy in their own data centers.

Though many CIO’s might dispute this claim there is no doubt that they are using the cloud as part of their security strategy. That can be everything from data replication and disaster recovery to using the cloud as a DMZ for mobile users and customer interaction.

In this connected and mobile world CIOs are being particularly creative in building secure data environments, and during this session we will also have case studies of the challenges enterprises and government organisations have faced and how they have addressed them.

We will also explore why many vendors and service are developing Unified Data Security solutions and whether there is a reality in this notion or whether it is still more appropriate to buy best of breed solutions.

The overall aim of this session is that delegates will have identified some answers to their own data security challenges and shared ideas through the panel sessions. If data security is high on your list of priorities then this Spotlight Session is one you must not miss.

Business Outcomes - driving Big Data & Analytics

At this year’s Powering the Cloud event we will be addressing, through our Spotlight Sessions, five of the most important issues for CIOs over the next few years. In doing so we will attempt to address more than just the technology issues, rather the broader business opportunities and challenges.

The first subject we will address is the much hyped ‘Big Data & Analytics’ where today there are lots of articles and discussions on the technology surrounding it, with little focus on the business opportunity and how deep analytics of big data should be used to increase customer care and product quality, delivering loyalty, reputation and higher profitability. Most importantly in this tough economic times giving the organisation a major Competitive Advantage.

And it is not just commercial businesses that aim to prosper from Big Data & Analytics as according to IDC in their ‘Government Insights’ report ‘Western European government executives will invest first in Big Data methodologies and technologies.’ Silvia Piai, research manager, IDC EMEA Government Insights commented that "Big Data represents a cultural shift in how government organizations operate."

Despite the optimism about the growth of government activity in this are the concern is that the report concludes that ‘government Big Data initiatives could fail to deliver adequate return on investment due to narrowly focused technical implementations that take into account only the volume aspect of Big Data and neglect variety and velocity’.

It is this issue of too narrow a focus on the technology that we plan to address during our Spotlight Session.

If you look at IDC’s figures in their ‘Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012 – 2015 Forecast’ they show that organisations spend for 2011 showed that 41.5% went on services, 29.7% on software and 28.8% on servers, storage and networking.

Most observers believe that this percentage spent on services will rise quite substantially as organisations embrace the cloud to manage the scalability they will need to cope with the volumes of data and the different sources from which it is obtained.

During the session we will address the whole are of ‘Big Data and the Cloud’, and the practicality of running Big Data & Analytics within a cloud or hybrid environment. We plan to have case studies showing cloud deployments and the challenges and opportunities that represents and how organisations have prospered by such deployments.

One of the most important topics we will address is ‘Completing the Loop’. How Big Data & Analytics is not a snap shot process rather one of continually improving data, analytics, processes, procedures and results. This is really where the Business Outcome is the most important factor and where the organisation gets the pay back.

Just as important for all directors and managers of European businesses is the topic of ‘Big Data and the Law’, the legal implications of what is stored, where it is stored and the responsibilities of user and datacenter/cloud owner. There are new proposals from the European Union on data ownership, retention, usage and storage and we will look deeply into the implications of these proposals to business owners.

In taking this broad view of Big Data & Analytics we cannot ignore the implications on the technology within the data center. So we will be covering subjects such as designing Big Data storage infrastructures and how to address the processing and communications challenges posed by streaming data, social media data, multimedia content, M2M and mobile activity and events.

At a software strategic level topics like Business Database Management: Dealing with Big Data and when to use columnar data warehouses, analytic appliances, Hadoop, and MapReduce for complex, big data workloads will be explored.

The overall objective of this Spotlight Session is to familiarise delegates with all the business and technology issues around Big Data & Analytics. Show the opportunities that this opens up for all types of organisations and give enough detail so that delegates can go back to the office with a much deeper understanding and ready to start their Big Data & Analytics projects or take their existing ones on to the next level.

If you would like to join in the discussion then register to attend Powering the Cloud www.poweringthecloud.com/ , most presentations will include Q&A and panel sessions where you can give your views alongside your peers. I look forward to meeting you and exchanging ideas.