Conference Programmes

Cloud computing is probably the single biggest mega-trend of the past few years.  Being so high profile, the ‘herd effect’ has begun in earnest, with many business instinctively reacting to the trend, going to the cloud primarily through fear of being left behind.  However, this results with companies implementing cloud services that are not correctly provisioned for their needs, which can lead to difficulty scaling or worse, poor security.

Whether you’re currently hosting, or thinking of hosting, a website and web applications in the cloud – this session will cover the best practice considerations for getting the most appropriate cloud solution in place.

Key takeaways:

• Cloud services can lower costs – but only if selected and implemented correctly.
• Cloud security issues – how they are prevented or overcome with the right approach
• Planning for disasters – business continuity and added benefits of cloud solutions

Learn about Honda UK’s journey to a private and then public cloud solution to meet the variable traffic demands of their website.  The internally hosted website struggled to cope with peaks in demand around product launches and advertising campaigns, leading to the search for an alternative.  Mervyn Eyles, ICT Infrastructure Manager, will explain the pros and cons of Honda’s journey to a cloud solution and how it supports the business plans.

Enterprises everywhere are adopting a cloud computing model through use of public clouds; building private clouds; and consolidating on shared, elastically scalable platforms and infrastructure. Oracle is the technology that powers most public clouds as well as private clouds today. Attend this keynote to learn how Oracle's comprehensive cloud strategy delivers the most complete and integrated cloud offerings in the industry, providing customers with choice and delivering unmatched business value.

Liam Maxwell will discuss the G cloud programme and use it as an illustration of the changes the Government IT strategy is bringing. He'll focus on the approach to cross government projects and also the importance of the upcoming standards consultation.

The cloud is often characterized as supporting "business agility."  While this is no doubt good, it is qualitative and unsuitable for business decision-making.  In fact, the cloud has numerous value drivers: these include total cost reduction, revenue growth, and user experience enhancement, all of which can be rigorously, quantitatively assessed.  The presenter will overview the often-counterintuitive insights of Cloudonomics, the disciplined approach that he founded, which has implications for customers as well as in the development of cloud service provider strategy.

Cloud computing is the delivery of information technology as a service rather than a product. How this service is provided continues to be abstracted from the consumer, yet it's still of paramount importance for reliability, security and performance. This panel will take a look under the covers of the cloud, examining the issues that are of interest to public cloud providers and users of private and hybrid clouds.”

Panelists:

Dave Wright - Global VP Solution, Service Now ; Tony Lucas - Founder, Flexiant; John Cowan - Co –Founder, 6Fusion;  Chris Drake - Founder, FireHost; Philippe Weppe - President, EMEA, Joyent; Jamie Butler - Cloud Channel Manager, Redstor

Chris Rae Vice President of Cloud Solution Sales, CA Technologies EMEA will provide insights on what history can tell us about the future of computing, how war babies made the mainframe and how the baby boomers have turned their back on it. He will also discuss why constant technology innovation around customers and employees is vital, and why IT leaders need to constantly harness new technologies with greater speed and agility. 

Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) is a leading operator of restaurants and pubs in the UK with 40,000 employees and around1,600 businesses including well-known brands such as Harvester, All Bar One, Vintage Inns and Toby Carvery.

Mike Sackman, CIO of M&B, will speak about the path to business agility and innovation as he looks to transform M&B’s IT infrastructure by using a private cloud service and managed network.  This will not only reduce the cost of IT but also deliver a more flexible solution that can meet the needs of the company as it realises its strategy of expanding and developing its core food brands and significantly increasing the number of its businesses in the UK; Mike will ultimately talk about how he is delivering service differentiation by using the cloud.

In his keynote Marten will cover cloud APIs and standards – 

• Why are APIs so important in clouds
• Do APIs have to be open?
• How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be?
• Will we end up with 1, 2, 3 or more competing cloud standards?

Cloud computing demands new approaches to building data center infrastructure and the key to success is a solid engineered Cloud foundation. But how do you build this foundation? Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, an Oracle Engineered System provides you with the best possible foundation for running your enterprise applications in a Cloud with elasticity, reliability, and scale. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is designed to provide uncompromised, engineered performance for Oracle, and all other enterprise applications. It makes enterprise applications run faster, more efficiently and it does this consistently and predictably, within a Cloud.

Ian will talk about where the current state of cloud is based on his experience implementing cloud servers and services in a global mobile company and at News International. This will be an honest picture of the reality of cloud as opposed to any web based or virtualisation service being called cloud as is often the case. A particular focus will be paid to what is a cloud and what the service is that you should expect and issues you might encounter on implementing cloud services. Lessons learned from implementing Google, Amazon and Salesforce will also be shared.

We’re all familiar with the term in ‘the Cloud’ but what does it exactly mean for business intelligence, data analytics and data warehousing? Attend this session and discover how and why organizations are turning to Cloud-based solutions to analyse their Big Data and weigh up the benefits. This session will show that by outsourcing your analytic requirements using a pay-as-you-go subscription-based model, you can focus more on being innovative and less on infrastructure.  Learn how analytical performance can be improved and flexed by using cloud-based environments. Discover the strategy behind the cloud for Big Data and how the cloud is revolutionizing data analytics and data warehousing.  The session will focus on real customers including BT and other leading brands who are benefiting from moving their data warehousing and data analytics infrastructure in to the Cloud

Today Airline survival totally depends on e-services, self-services and back-end systems easing access to airlines products. The nature of the industry is artificially constrained by older and now increasingly irrelevant mechanisms. The reality of today's world is that no one has any right to impose any the older mechanisms on any user community. Airlines are acknowledging what the consumers are expecting from the industry to deliver. 

To meet users expectation airlines need to have the informational services available 24X7X365 and at any location with a touch of button or voice with no boundaries. 

The open web, mobiles, tablets technologies have has enabled users to enjoy almost unlimited access to content. However that content has been constrained by the structures of those who believed that they are the gatekeepers. And they still believe that they can control that and impose the relevant taxes for the privilege. Cloud Computing, Open Systems and low cost app development with rapid deployment and mass consumer adoption all conspire to away these old legacy structures.

Cloud Computing does it - the airlines need a common delivery infrastructure to do so which enables the distribution of product and content in any way shape or form. Gulf Air has realized those needs and has established its private cloud and connection to open cloud community   to provide a seamless end to end passenger journey from the time of travel planning   until reaching to final destination. 

Of course cloud computing needs the proper agile structural infrastructure technology should be available to support the travel journey. For example online booking, self-service check-in, online payment, access to loyalty programme, etc. In the other hand, as an airline flying to different, the Airlines need flexibility and scalable IT services. Airport IT services, for example, need to accommodate a range of capabilities for a single flight operation a few times a week and to scale it into a 24/7 hub-type operation. In regular and irregular operations the nature of operations may change with only minutes’ notice whereby the need to react and adhere to those changes promptly.    

In this session, learn how Ethernet-based SAN architectures leverage off-the-shelf hardware, proven Ethernet, and distributed storage processing to enable a building block approach to scalability - no forklift upgrades required.  With Ethernet SAN, capacity and performance both scale linearly with user demand without forcing users into a complex tiered storage environment to deal with price-performance tradeoffs. Now the same storage building blocks can be configured for backup or production, virtualisation or database, enabling a flexible one-tier-for-all architecture.  Learn how organizations today are already leveraging Ethernet SAN technology as the storage backbone of their dynamic public and private cloud architectures.

Cloud computing is causing a fundamental shift in the way that organisations consume and provide enterprise IT services. This presentation outlines the BBC’s view of cloud computing, why it is interested in it, and the approach taken to evaluating the value of a hybrid cloud environment.

The impact of cloud technologies goes beyond reducing IT costs and improving business efficiency. Cloud computing combined with web based applications and services are preparing the ground for new European start-ups that could play a positive role in the IT landscape. Companies of all sizes and government institutions will achieve new levels of productivity and innovation. The cloud and web services industries will be a key source of new jobs and could help making great gains in addressing major healthcare, education and other societal issues.
We at the European Commission DG Information Society have done intensive work in the last two years in bringing together expertise and experience to answer questions like what is Cloud Computing and how it differentiates from other IT systems? What is the future of Cloud computing? What are the opportunities for European industry? What are the regulatory and technological barriers to be lifted? For example, you are already aware of the report of our Expert Group on the Future of Cloud Computing or the report of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) on cloud security.
Further to this, Cloud Computing is highlighted in the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE). Our Commissioner and Vice President Neelie Kroes, announced early this year the launch of a Cloud Computing strategy for Europe. She wants to make Europe not only ‘cloud-friendly’ by providing the right regulatory framework but most importantly ‘cloud-active’ which means that she wants European IT industry especially SMEs to take the opportunity and become leaders in the area. For this to happen, VP Kroes has initiated a number of private and public consultations with industrial stakeholders looking both at the supply and demand side.
According to analysts at Pierre Audoin Consulting, “Cloud computing, a capital-intensive, network-based market segment, is a perfect playground for Europe’s telecom giants and its strong IT services industry. Their experience in networks, outsourcing and professional services could help them gain a worldwide standing while investing a lot in European data centres, thus limiting the technological dependency and value transfer from the US. Cloud computing is also preparing the ground for new European start-ups that could play a role in tomorrow’s IT landscape.”
Cloud computing can boost Europe’s competitiveness and will play a major role in our economy, creating new jobs and growth.

Join Hans Teske, CTO of Condé Nast Digital Germany, and Bryta Schulz, VP of Marketing for GoGrid, as they discuss best practices for moving infrastructure to the cloud. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offers compelling cost and performance benefits, but traditional IaaS architectures can present security and other challenges for many companies. Learn how Condé Nast Germany moved away from an expensive hosted infrastructure and embraced the cloud with a solution based on security, content management, and performance best practices.  The company’s hybrid cloud solution allows it to easily deliver content to computers and mobile devices, scale to match traffic in minutes, and secure customer data in dedicated servers. Since moving to the cloud, the company has been able to take advantage of reduced costs while gaining more control over its infrastructure. 

This session will introduce views and aspect of the cloud computing phenomenon and how individuals, companies, and whole industries have begun and continue into the journey of cloud computing. We will examine the themes that are emerging from the early initial stages of virtualization and onto the commodization of IT services and now onto the new social enterprise and new business models emerging across many markets in local, regional and global sectors. 

Themes  in context

Exploring the technology and business viewpoints around cloud computing including open data, big data,  mobility and cloud computing service ecosystems.  The new trends “inside-out” and “outside-in” we are seeing in how cloud computing inside the organization and outside is affecting the way people, citizens, commerce and markets are evolving in the new decade. 

The emerging strategies of Cloud

The question  is not if cloud is here, but how to understand, rationalize and align where cloud computing potential can best deliver value to employees, communities, enterprises and markets.
We will explore three examples of new business model ecosystems  and look at the value case in each around monetization strategies for consumers and providers of cloud based products and services.
This also will highlight the underpinning topologies of networks, data center and service access issues that area affected by changes in security, standards, interoperability and portability choices.

Ecosystems
3 examples
• Federated Cloud Ecosystem
• Supply chain Cloud
• Community Social Cloud Platforms
Monetization strategies
The ROI value case for cloud from the inside and outside perspectives of Public and Private sectors
• Macro economic view
• Micro economic view

Public and private sector trends to Cloud Adoption

The “when” and “where” of cloud is briefing examining in examples of scope of where Cloud is being used in public and private sectors. This includes a few case studies to illustrate  how we see this in real practice delivery
in the G cloud in the UK public sector and in the private sector.

Constructing the Cloud Strategy

We explore the dimensions of strategy and roadmap development for cloud computing.    We will discuss Capgemini approaches to strategy  and roadmap development.

Delivering the Cloud

The session is concluded with the summary of the practical delivery of sustainable , secure cloud and a summary of Capgemini  positioning and approach to cloud.

While we’re all acutely aware of cloud computing benefits, few enterprises truly optimize cloud computing investments by migrating mission-critical applications to a cloud environment. But, as businesses gain confidence in the cloud, they will increasingly look to shift enterprise applications from traditional physical environments to external cloud platforms to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability and cost benefits of cloud computing.

In this session, Karl Deacon, who manages EMEA operations for cloud innovator Virtustream, will share best practices for shifting critical enterprise applications into the cloud to improve performance and increase efficiencies. Deacon will also present real-world case studies that highlight tangible benefits achieved from cloud-based deployments and will offer attendees tips for migrations.

One such case study will be presented on Domino Sugar and its U.K. subsidiary Tate & Lyle. Domino Sugar moved more than 100 servers with 70 instances of SAP to the cloud in less than 90 days, which represented the largest deployment of a SAP production environment in a multi-tenant private cloud.

Attendees will learn how enterprises can double their SAP performance, improve elasticity and disaster recovery and cost savings while taking away strategies for ensuring a successful transition to a cloud environment.

Presentation summary: Tony will discuss the key areas you need to consider as a business in building or moving to a cloud platform.  The talk will cover technical and business considerations and is designed to be a thought provoking presentation to help you decide what is best for your business, by arming you with the questions and points you need to consider to build a cloud platform effectively.  It will cover Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud architectures.

CompatibleOne is an open source project with the goal of providing middleware for the description, brokering and federation of heterogeneous clouds comprising resources provisioned by different providers and carriers. CompatibleOne aims at being interoperable with most platforms to provide maximum freedom to users and developers and consequently breaking vendor lock-in. Ian James Marshall will demonstrate the  first cloud brokerage proof of concept by CompatibleOne and show the feasibility of cloud brokerage between OpenNebula and OpenStack platforms, validating the VM interoperability mechanisms as planned by CompatibleOne. CompatibleOne is open to anyone wishing to contribute efforts for the building of an Open Cloud respecting open standards and open data formats where all software and documentation is to be published under an open source license. 

Making the move to cloud-based technologies can be a daunting task. There are a few key myths surrounding the cloud, relating to data security, geographic locations, control, outages and exit strategies, which continue to hold people back from adopting cloud tools and services. In this session, Alastair will be separating fact from fiction and highlighting how The Met Office successfully made the leap to the cloud, replacing SharePoint with Huddle for project management, task management and file sharing.

When faced with the challenge of collaborating on scientific documents with colleagues around the world, and working more effectively with team members, other government departments, partners and stakeholders, the Met Office turned to Huddle. Huddle enables the Met Office to support mobile working and has played a vital role in the organization’s internal and external communications with teams working with the Rwanda Meteorological Service.

The old paradigm is broken. Traditional enterprise software was designed for servers inside the firewall, to keep content in and the outside world out. Today, 90 per cent of collaborations happen between companies, across the firewall, and the cloud offers organisations a way to collaborate effectively. Alastair will present how organisations are successfully making the leap to the cloud.

The technology industry has frequently been challenged over its ability to ‘hype’ or ‘misrepresent’ a topic, but in the case of Clouds a remarkable new challenge has occurred in the difference in the view of what clouds represent to Business and IT managers. How can this be? And why are the 2012 predications of Analysts adding ‘fuel to the flames’ of the Cloud debate.

With recent technology and simplification breakthroughs, private clouds will fast become a practical reality for companies of all sizes.  Any business will soon be able to simply build and operate the massive compute horsepower and storage capacity normally reserved for the largest companies built with racks of inexpensive commodity servers.  The imminent accessibility to such horsepower will be applied to a host of analytical problems from medical research to consumer behavior, that in the not so distant past were impractical to address.  Business will change.  Industries like healthcare will change.  The world will change.

Chris C. Kemp, the CEO of Nebula, will discuss the following:
•The three converging trends that are driving the need for private clouds
•The challenges still existing that are roadblocks to private cloud rollouts
•What the ideal private cloud platform looks like and how organizations can simply deploy such platform

While organizations look to the cloud as a serious option for today’s IT deployments, many are still trying to determine how to make hybrid on-premise and cloud environments work.  Cloud providers must address latency, bandwidth, and provisioning issues to be considered. Moreover, security and privacy are cited as key impediments to the adoption of cloud services.  How can a service establish "trust" in a hybrid environment?
During this session, attendees will learn about best practices for employing and maintaining a "trust" protocol that not only addresses these concerns, but also preserves the agility that is all too often lost when security becomes a focus.

Cloud computing is fundamentally shifting the enterprise network from fixed, data-centric, server technologies to a flexible, application-driven, dispersed network that aligns more closely to business needs. Today, the adoption of cloud computing is enabling companies around the world to be successful despite their size and existing technology infrastructure. In this presentation, Travis Spencer, a Sr. Technical Architect in Ping’s CTO office, will review lessons learned from the hundreds of Ping Identity customers who have implemented cloud identity strategies.

Last year, the law firm Thomson Snell & Passmore undertook an ambitious programme of work to move their IT environment into the cloud. This presentation provides insight into the business rational, the migration process and more importantly describes some of the successes and failures that they experienced. A non technical presentation that focuses on how one firm chose to develop its IT environment.

Cloud computing , our experience

•  Why CPC  moved to the Cloud
• How and Why CPC chose to partner with On Line Computing/LondonCloud          
• CPC’s Technical Experience – As presented by a lay man
• CPC’s User Experience
• What business apps we now use from the Cloud and how it is helping shape our business

Real life experience from a firm that has been hands-on with cloud computing for over 5 years.  Find out what it has meant in practical terms and the benefits they have unlocked. Back in 2006 London Accountants, Goodman Jones, took a step into the cloud and started using Twinfield Online Accounting.   At the time it was almost unheard of for a UK firm of Chartered Accountants to take this approach. Going against tradition has reaped its rewards, but has not always been easy. In the session, they will share the benefits they have gained and the lessons they have learnt.

Malcolm Graham, CEO of LimeTree, will examine the process of selecting Cloud Service Providers from an Agency point of view. LimeTree hosts over 100 websites for clients, using some Cloud and non Cloud Service Providers. He will draw upon this experience to discuss the pros and cons of working with Cloud based service providers. He will explain his criteria for selecting suppliers, a process which is, perhaps surprisingly, not always based on the technology on offer alone. 

Every infrastructure implementation is unique, and when done in the cloud, the capabilities are limitless. So how do you overcome your technical challenges and implement a cloud solution that leverages industry best practices? To meet the demand for its expanding digital media platform, Martini Media needed NOSQL capabilities that could span multiple data centers. Join the GoGrid team and learn how Martini successfully moved to the GoGrid cloud, discovered its "cloud fingerprint," and grew its market share in the process. By attending this session, attendees will learn how Martini Media:
• Identified its technical hurdles
• Leveraged best-of-class cloud technology • Positioned the company for growth using unique cloud solutions from GoGrid

Just as the earth’s ozone layer sits above the clouds and protects the entire biosphere, a sophisticated security layer needed that enables enterprises to have a single policy-driven approach to securing access to cloud resources and protecting information in the cloud.

Symantec O3 “Ozone” is a new cloud security platform for Access Control, Information Security and Compliance Control designed to protect all enterprise cloud applications and cloud infrastructures. The solution works across public, private, and hybrid clouds to manage access control and protect information as it flows between enterprise applications and users and the various cloud services they rely on every day. Join this session to learn how you can extend your identity and information security policies to the cloud independently of specific cloud service providers.

It is easy to forget that charities are businesses like any other, whichever area they support.

They have the same internal structure – Finance, HR, IS etc. – and relevant assets – financial information, personnel information.

Add in information on supporters and vulnerable adults and children, drug trials and debit/credit data, and you have a tempting target.

Charities, whatever their size, take steps to protect themselves and their assets., because they have much to lose, mainly their good name with their  ‘customers’ – their supporters.

The steps will include processes to prevent/detect malware, viruses  and hackers; process to prevent data loss/leakage,  and standards and policies.

However, while taking the same steps that every company does, charities often do not have same resources and have to do more with less.

My presentation will explain how charities manage to do that.

The current notion of security is outdated in the Information Society of the 21st Century, and inhibits progress.  This presentation will talk about techniques that can be used to evolve beyond security towards providing business benefits that will invigorate the industry and reduce the barriers for adoption of new services such as the Cloud.

As adoption of cloud computing across the business community continues to explode, many cite security fears as a reason for delaying cloud adoption. But are cloud systems more or less secure than traditional non-cloud options? Many facets of cloud systems can act to increase  security, such as the inability to hide failings, but also concentrating tasks that would be spread across many systems into a more manageable number of better administered servers. In a cloud environment with a large and varied user base, unusual events tend to become common occurrences. Cloud providers can learn from their frequent exposure to such events to design systems that provide more security than can be achieved by stand alone non-cloud systems.

Traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems typically make a number of assumptions that are no longer valid when migrating to the cloud. It's no longer possible to assume that only company employees may have network access to services, that all users are in the HR database, that your own staff administer the systems. The way forward is to follow the Jericho Forum Identity Commandments - separating Identity from Access Management and Entitlement, extending Identity to more than just people, using strong personas to allow trust and privacy into scalable cloud environments.

Many conflicting messages are sent around regarding cloud computing.  This leads to confusion and doubt with leaders in organisations whether they would go for cloud computing solutions or not.  On top of that, on frequent intervals, new surveys from divers consulting and security firms appear where many threats and risks are described at length, which makes leaders and employees nervous and reluctant to use cloud computing solutions.  In this session Mr. Marc Vael will tell his view on why trust in and value from cloud computing solutions is possible and should be part of any organisation’s IT strategy.  He will use his own experience from helping organisations making the decision. 

The CloudForce is a 3 year collaborative R&D project starting in January 2012, which aims at building an open software engineering platform, for the collaborative development of distributed applications to be deployed on multiple Cloud infrastructures. We aim at supporting virtualized multi-tier applications such as JavaEE - OSGi. The results of CloudForce will contain a set of software components to manage the lifecycle of such complex virtual appliances. It will include components for modeling applications (Think), developing and building images (Build), a multi-IaaS compliant PaaS platform (Run) for their deployment, orchestration, performance testing, self-management (elasticity, green IT optimisation) and provisioning. The software layer at the PaaS level will include PaaS-IaaS interoperability, allowing to develop and deploy such application potentially on multi IaaS (supporting either one IaaS at a time, or hybrid scenarios). The platform will be available through a self-service portal. The results of the project will be made available as open source components through the OW2 Open Source Cloudware initiative.

EC funded project with the goal to create infrastructure capable of hosting 20 (twenty) priority e-Government services defined by EU Acquis, 12 (twelve) of which are G2C and 8 (eight) G2B services making grounds for upgrade from current Serbian e-Service average sophistication level 2 (1-way interaction) to the level 3 (2-way interaction) and 4 (transaction). IaaS-based cloud infrastructure was chosen implementing basic cloud management, HA/FT blade server virtualization, 10Gbps CEE data center LAN infrastructure, capable 10Gbps/1Gbps WAN infrastructure and HA perimeter security appliance, backed with adequate power and cooling. Risk and change management had to be done during entire project solving many problems caused by anticipated changes new infrastructure would introduce in services security and governance. Project will be closely monitored by the EC by the EU Delegation to the Serbia and, if fulfills expectations, will have second phase in establishing national cloud infrastructure for entire public and civil administration.

Crowd-sourcing, Cloud collaboration, Citizen reporters and Blackberry rioters. 2011 saw new
shifts in the relationship between companies, society and connected individuals. How much has
the game changed and why? And what will it mean for the future of UK plc? 

Large businesses are excited by Cloud computing, mainly as a way of reducing IT costs and facilitating growth without capital expenditure. To the small business the potential benefits are different. IT cost savings will not be a major driving factor. This presentation looks at the benefits of cloud based apps to two example businesses, one in the building trade and the other a business service provider – The tradesman at one end and the professional at the other.

The speaker will argue that Businesses, especially owner managed ones are changing the way they do business and this is being driven by the recession on the one hand and technical innovations on the other. These innovations will generally be delivered as a cloud service. Companies with less than 50 employees will find themselves able to compete with larger better resourced operations, especially with the benefit of nimble footwork and some powerful SaaS applications.

As a small business owner or as a Cloud provider, come and hear some stimulating ideas on the future of the owner managed business.

The accelerating adoption of cloud services including software-, infrastructure-, and platform-as-a-service, is cementing the role of the cloud as a bona fide Operating System. For IT departments within enterprises, government, and educational institutions, this shift creates a significant security challenge. Unlike the past, when operating systems were secured within the firewall, IT must now protect resources that bilaterally span the network perimeter. This session will discuss the technical and organizational challenges associated with securing the Cloud. Specifically, the speaker will discuss the requirements for creating a Trust Fabric for the Cloud that that can centrally enforce security policies across public and private clouds by unifying web access management, federated single sign-on, and user management/provisioning with identity management.

The procurement of cloud computing services involves a wide range of issues and risks for educational institutions. The technologies and services available are rapidly evolving, differ greatly between providers and are subject to complex contractual arrangements with potentially serious legal and business implications. There is no specific cloud computing legislation but the area is subject to a wide and growing range of laws relating to Internet-based services, some written decades ago (Baker, 2009). Resolution of the new issues relating to security, privacy and regulation in the cloud will take many years (Kaufman, 2009). This presentation outlines the key issues which institutions need to investigate when considering the deployment of services in the cloud to students, faculty and staff.

The fast emerging cloud services business arena is creating numerous new opportunities for both IT users and IT players beyond the traditional Enterprise IT ecosystem. In response, SNIA's Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) has created the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). Designed to enable interoperable cloud storage and data management, the CDMI specification is addressing a total cloud storage solution – helping users avoid the chaos of proprietary advances and partial solution APIs that would erode the integrity of the cloud model.   This presentation will cover popular use cases for cloud including storage clouds and enterprise or application specific clouds. Multi-tenancy, private, and hybrid clouds are of interest to IT professionals, and this tutorial explores various cloud options and scenarios, along with options and recommendations for building your business case.
Learning Objectives
• Understand your options for cloud and how to create a cloud business case
• Gain an understanding of how popular cloud use cases are architected and implemented
• Understand what essential elements to include in an RFP/RFI, based on the cloud use case and the business case

Collaboration is the underpinning of innovation, which is the basis of companies' competitive currency. While team work is nothing new, technological developments are enabling new ways of working that better harness people's natural social instincts. These developments enable better ways of working not just at workers' office desks, but across multitude of devices and locations. Thomas will provide a brief overview of how you can harness these new capabilities and why should consider doing so soon.

Why you'll hate the cloud but them learn to love it. A talk about Dennis Interactive's journey into hosting their websites in the cloud versus traditional publishing. Hear about some of the teething problems to avoid, but most importantly learn why some of the clouds perceived weaknesses are actually it's greatest strengths.

As evolving IT and application usage is making a mess out of the orchestrated, ordered place your datacentre used to be, this presentation will discuss how businesses can realise the benefits of building a cloud network that is simplistic, cost effective and which meets end user requirements.  In this session you will learn how to get results with less latency, less space, less power, less cost and more control.

Much of today’s switching innovation is looking in the wrong direction:  the way it used to be.  Previously top-down network architectures must now orientate laterally too to cope with hyper-sensitive latency demands and the new challenges of inter-cloud connectivity.

Essentially, while Ethernet networks are big and fast, they need to get smarter too.

An increasingly mobile enterprise workforce now demands a consumer-grade communications experience that matches what they have come to expect on their tablet, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. This enterprise shift presents significant market opportunities and challenges for mobile, fixed-line and cable service providers seeking to deliver next generation mobile applications and services on a converged network.

Service providers can now leverage a reliable, cloud-based service delivery model to speed time-to-market for converged applications and services, while tapping into subscriber revenue opportunities made possible by new, unified communications (UC) services that can be extended to mobile tablets and smartphones. The ability to deliver videoconferencing, web collaboration, presence management, and other in-demand UC services to an enterprise end-user’s preferred mobile device is proving critical for MNOs and service providers seeking to combat the growing threat posed by Over-The-Top (OTT) players such as Apple and Google that are chomping at the bit to seize mobile subscribers and revenues. In this era of budget cuts and decreased spending, the combination of cloud and mobility really do herald a communications revolution.

Jed Pell, director of sales engineering for Europe, Middle East and Africa, at BroadSoft, Inc. has more than 23 years of experience in the global telecoms industry and will be discussing how Cloud + Mobility = an enterprise communications revolution.

Until recently, experiencing art meant physically visiting a gallery. In an age of digitisation and universal access to digital media, Rob will talk about Tate's ambitious projects to lead the way in bringing art to new audiences through digital channels. Through the compilation of online digital catalogues, the adoption of mobile technologies and pushing multimedia content to its limits Tate is providing a variety of ways for the global community to engage with art and some of the specific challenges in managing digitally born artworks. Come to this talk to hear about the achievements, opportunities and challenges faced by one of Britain's most popular institutions.

As cloud computing evolves to cover a broad range of markets, the fundamental rack infrastructure of the cloud must evolve with it.  As more customers are added to the cloud from increasingly diverse markets, the rack infrastructure must become more flexible to adapt to the changing needs, while continuing to reduce costs.   Rackspace and NextIO will jointly addresses the evolving requirements of the server rack for cloud computing and the use of a new hardware technology called PCI Express I/O Virtualization to address the requirements. The presentation will describe how PCI Express I/O Virtualization enables successful cloud computing platforms and give a vision for the technology going forward.

Organisations are increasingly looking to close legacy data centres and move to lower cost, out of town commercial data centres while retaining the flexibility to configure to their own bespoke requirements. Aidan Paul will discuss how customised data centre solutions ensure an energy efficient data centre.

Why should the board be interested in Utility Computing or Cloud? After all the marketing hype and bastardisation of the term one can understand the confusion and scepticism for what to many is another panacea put out by the IT crowd.  In this session we will explore the commercial case for developing a Cloud platform within a wider business strategy and why many organisations will go to the trouble of re-engineering their business models as well as their IT architectures.  We will also explore the role of the IT department and the service provider in this transition and the opportunities that exist beyond the provision of commodity services.

Automobiles make it easy for an ordinary human to travel long distances. Although they’re easy to operate, the underlying technology is incredibly complex and cloud is no different.  As technology providers rush to deliver a cloud solution, many expect to magically morph their existing business into a successful cloud offering.  Hexagrid will present a few key differences between traditional IT business models and cloud business models so that service providers can enter the market prepared for success.  Discussion topics will include:

 1.  Hardware:  How and why does cloud change hardware requirements and how does this decision directly affect my ability to compete in the marketplace?

2.  Software:  Why bolting together multiple products from disparate vendors is not only unnecessary, but a risk you should refuse to take.

3.  Monitoring/Support:  Cloud providers are expected to deliver the goods as well as monitor and support every aspect of a cloud offering.  Is your business prepared?

4.  Billing:  Customers associate cloud with comprehensive, expecting a single bill for total services. How does this fact change outsourcing/contracting relationships in cloud?

There are, of course, many other considerations when designing a cloud offering, but experience has shown these to cause the most surprise amongst new cloud providers. Benefit from addressing these issues during the product development cycle and go to market with a mature, responsive cloud product.

In a few years time we will find it hard to explain to others that we went to work to do a job that we could do just as well where we were. We will tell them that we used precious fuel to get there and wasted our time travelling to offices that were full of other people doing exactly the same. It's not good for us, the planet or for preserving increasingly expensive and scarce resources. 

In this session Richard will describe the landscape against which we will adopt an ‘any time, any place, on any device’ approach to our enterprise

This presentation is aimed at MSPs/VARs looking to become a Cloud Solution/Service Provider (CSP) and endeavouring to choose a Cloud Platform.

Comparing and contrasting Cloud providers in the channel can be a daunting and somewhat confusing task. ChannelCloud’s sister company is an MSP so we understand this very clearly.

In a market where many new vendors are emerging almost daily, it is more important than ever for MSPs/VARs to ensure;
•    Their Cloud provider is a good fit for them
•    That the Cloud platform itself can become an integral part of the MSP’s overall strategy & service offering, thereby allowing MSPs to successfully grow their business
•    That all the while the provider can help the MSP protect their ever important, existing on-premise support revenue
•    That the MSP does not need to re-invent the wheel, they can continue using their existing PSA & RMM tools

This presentation will focus on the key issues to be taken into consideration when choosing a Cloud provider. It will provide practical advice on the issues which need to be addressed prior to taking a decision regarding who to partner with, including the pitfalls to avoid and the best practices which your Cloud provider should adhere to.

Cloud computing is a strategic play, and has the potential to turn your business into a more agile, flexible competitor. Time to market decreases, internal complexities are reduced, and new business models become tenable.

But how can you be sure your service provider has the capabilities in place to facilitate this transformation?  In this session, Neil Cresswell, MD for Savvis in EMEA, will present the 10 key competencies that Cloud Service Providers need to demonstrate to help drive business growth.  

A division of PEER 1 Hosting, Zunicore is the first professional-grade public cloud built for business, offering users far greater control, flexibility, reliability and cost-efficiency. Zunicore Cloud Hosting is built on the principle that a company should be able to focus on controlling its core business, rather than on its IT delivery vehicle. Built with the business professional in mind, the cloud hosting solution offers users a high degree of control and flexibility, and leverages the established infrastructure of PEER 1 Hosting’s wholly-owned FastFiber Network

Zunicore’s professional-grade cloud service allows users to benefit from customisable resource pools alongside preset virtual machines, hands-free auto-scaling and transparent pricing. FairPlay Pricing™ guarantees that customers pay only for what they use and are never locked into a long-term contract.  The complexities of managing the cloud have driven many businesses away from the public cloud. Now, with Zunicore’s simple dashboard that shows users the resources being used, the amount of resource remaining, and options to increase or decrease resources, it is easier for companies to migrate to the cloud.

Every time a big change arrives in IT, universal usages and applications, namely collaboration and communication, are the first ones to be impacted and this will change the way millions of people work.

In these two blogs, in French (but you can use Google translate), I have explained in detail how the cloud will impact the 1 000 millions users of Office and Outlook:

Blog 1 

Blog 2

As Internet traffic and data volume increase, some companies are finding it beneficial to outsource computing so they can focus on their core business.  While this is good for business, cloud services providers are under pressure to meet new growing and volatile performance demands while maintaining a viable business model.

Fusion's ioMemory products help customers eliminate latency with a persistent, high-performance, high-capacity memory tier. Cloud Computing companies can leverage ioMemory to achieve the following benefits:

• Consistent response times for diverse and volatile customer workloads
• Flexible deployment capabilities for optimal system design
• More performance with less infrastructure to enable competitive pricing

Nigel will cover the lessons Rackspace have learned over the last 5 years in implementing their public cloud, both good and bad, and how the future looks for Cloud providers with new technology

Proact is the market leader in providing secure, available, flexible cloud services to enterprise organisations of all types.  Key to our success is our hybrid model giving customers choice - without compromise - on how and where cloud services are deployed in their environment.  This approach allows our customers to maximise their return on investment, improve service levels and de-risk the delivery of IT services.

This presentation gives an overview of Proact’s Private and Enterprise Cloud Services and how they provide options on ownership, location and service to deliver real business agility.  In addition, we will demonstrate real world examples of where this approach has been successful and how customers have benefited.

The “Cloud” moniker seems apply now to almost everything accessible via a web browser.  But what defines, and more importantly is required of service providers, distributors and resellers to successfully launch a public cloud?  Regardless of whether you are a buyer or a seller the customer acquisition models have changed and many sales playbooks no longer apply.  Are you prepared for no commit contracts?  Unpredictable “land and expand”growth patterns? Annuity based comp plans with a back office system to track and report?  Are you trying to protect your install base from cannibalization? How do you find or build the next generation “inventory-less reseller”? 

 If Cloud Computing, and in particular, public Cloud Computing is the quintessential form of outsourcing are you ready to deliver?    A brief summary and list of considerations and trends in Public Cloud computing intended for service providers, resellers and the distributors interested in reselling or building a public cloud solution.

Big Data has become very popular as what can probably best be described as “loosely structured large scale data”, i.e. data sets of relatively small files. For example, log files for analytics purposes. These data sets can become so large that they cannot be efficiently stored with traditional technologies (such as relational databases).

A similar situation is occurring due to the exponential growth in unstructured data sets with movies, photos and document files: companies are aggregating data beyond what can be stored with traditional storage systems (such as host based file storage systems).

Through scale-out object storage systems such as Amplidata's AmpliStor, Service Providers can build storage cloud infrastructures for massive unstructured data sets.

Cloud and Managed Service Providers build out a comprehensive portfolio of products and services in order to remain competitive, retain customers and capture higher-value enterprise accounts.  One such value-add service is load balancing and application delivery.

Load balancing makes scalable, reliable computing a reality in the cloud.  It helps cloud providers to increase revenue by selling additional hosting resources and upselling customers to higher-value application delivery services; it enables them to reduce customer churn by offering a distinctive, differentiated and valuable service; application delivery solutions attract high-value customers who require enterprise-quality capabilities.

In this session, Owen Garrett, Director, Product Management at Riverbed Technology will explain how leading IaaS cloud providers, including Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent and IIJ Japan are using Stingray software load balancing and application delivery solutions in their own cloud environments.  He will explain how their customers have used Riverbed's technology to improve the performance and reliability of their own applications.  Finally, a roadmap to delivering load balancing services in the cloud will outline the technical and commercial considerations for Riverbed's cloud provider programme.

Moving to the cloud allows service providers to increase their margin quickly. It is the hottest trend in technology today and businesses that are accelerating adoption and innovation in the cloud continue to see more and more success.

In this session, Rob Norman, CEO, Vnetrix will draw on real customer scenarios to show how they deliver scalable and highly secure cloud based solutions in fast moving industries, demonstrating how moving to the Cloud has bought increased margin for Vnetrix, reduced cost to the customer and faster time to market and increased agility to everyone. 

Navigating the subject of Cloud can be very confusing, and there is no one size fits all model.  Attend this session for a clear and impartial industry led understanding of Cloud terminology, definitions, examples, and guide to translating cloud-speak!

Recognising Cloud is not a universal solution for every organisation, this seminar focuses on how to assess the right deployment model for cloud services to meet your organisation’s needs and how to scope it as part of a wider IT strategy.

This presentation will focus on the key issues to be taken into consideration when sourcing a cloud service in order to ensure a good match between the providers capabilities and your organisations needs.  The aim is to provide practical advice on the issues to seek clarification on and how to spot best practice.

Cloud will typically be part of most organisations IT capability, but not necessarily the whole. Equally many cloud service or deployment models may be used as part of an overall strategy.  So with IT no longer constrained by the traditional server room and firewall, how do you begin to understanding the evolution of accountability, controls and governance in a cloud enabled environment? This presentation will provide guidance to end users.

Cloud is arguably more about business transformation and enablement than it is about technology.  However, to make sure organisations are able to achieve their objectives it is essential to understand the terms on which services are provided, the obligations of each party and the pitfalls to avoid.  This presentation will dive into key issues such as these  as well as SLA’s, term, on-boarding and exit, liabilities and jurisdictions.

What Standards are appropriate for Cloud Service Providers and cloud service users? Which programmes exist for technical, security, interoperability and commercial trust? and what is the landscape looking like for the evolution of standards and Best practice.

Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice can be a complicated and expensive task, but it's essential in today's business landscape. This applies to an enterprise trying to cut-costs, a young business unexpectedly saturated with customer demand, or a start-up looking to launch. There are many challenges when building a reliable, flexible architecture that can manage unpredictable behaviors of today's internet business. This presentation will review some of the lessons learned from building one of the world's largest distributed systems; Amazon.com.  The focus will be on state management which is one of the dominating factors in the scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of the overall system.

Having asked ourselves the questions of does cloud computing make access to electronic information easier, does it provide the services and security for the data that we hold and does it provide significant opportunities to make savings and come up with a potential “yes” to all these questions, Parliament are now on course to implement a “Cloud First” strategy. This presentation describes the learning process, follows Parliamentarians through current and predicted future patterns of using technology, describes some of the experimental steps taken to pilot new services,  as well as outlining the future steps required to transform the ICT organisation to significantly change the way in which we provide ICT services in Parliament.

How community clouds make sharing information the best tool for innovation, citizen engagement and consumer awareness.  David and Stephen will show how cloud provides businesses the agility to introduce new services and access new markets.

Every organisation is considering Cloud solutions as a part of their IT strategy.   Infrastructure as a Service may be the simplest and most cost effective start point for this, placing risk and responsibility of managing the IT infrastructure with the supplier of choice at a lower cost than managing it on premise.   Companies looking to benefit from off-premise IT can leverage the cloud by utilising elements of both public and private clouds. These can be seamlessly connected with the existing on-premise IT, offering an integrated hybrid environment.   Rise are Microsoft’s global Hosting Partner of the Year offering a market leading IaaS proposition.   Alex Hilton will show how clients can benefit from IaaS adoption, seamlessly integrate it in to their IT environment and support the presentation with real life examples of their implementation. 

In this session Barry Childe will explore the journey for implementing cloud technology within a large financial services company.  He will address the considerations, challenges and steps to consider when deciding whether to adopt cloud technology and will share some experiences on how the financial services community is using Cloud technology today.

IaaS and PaaS are fundamentally disrupting IT and will change to improve business agility. Private, public and hybrid clouds all benefit when the building blocks of IaaS and PaaS are open.

Chris will talk through the fast evolving ecosystem of open source tools that deliver open clouds, addressing the following questions:

• Are Open IaaS and PaaS solutions ready for deployment as a private cloud?
• Which organisations and workloads are already moving to private IaaS and PaaS?
• How close we are to reality of multiple public cloud providers offering the same APIs?

In a climate where businesses are rushing to cloud technology there are some wonderful opportunities for product and process innovation – but are we getting the balance right and have we forgotten some of the pre-requisites that enable smart people to do smart things.
 

Firms have to rapidly adapt to the changing landscape brought about by the three pillars of personal technology – mobile computing, social media and Cloud. These are re-defining people’s expectations about the nature and role of technology within business today. CIOs and their teams now have to carefully navigate their way between the conservative and progressive forces that are redefining the very nature and role of IT within the modern enterprise. Against the backdrop of a flagging Global economy, Cloud has the true potential to recharge the enterprise.
As the former CIO of Hiscox Insurance Andrew will provide a CIO’s perspective on why and how Cloud is going to significantly impact the world of Corporate IT, highlighting the benefits and threats associated with Cloud-based services, as well as how to build the foundations of a successful Cloud strategy.

Join Nimsoft CTO Mark Rivington as he discusses the state of IT, how we got here, and the forces driving us towards the cloud.  We’ll dive into specific management challenges that cloud based infrastructure brings with it, as well as approaches that work – and those that don’t. The talk will focus on monitoring and performance management, and will reference real world examples of Nimsoft customers who are using our cloud-based IT Management as a Service solution to manage their cloud with confidence.

Photobox is Europe's largest online photo and product personalisation service. It has millions of members and ships millions of orders per year. Each transaction is complex containing large amounts of user-supplied data (JPEGs, creation/customisation information).

The business is highly seasonal. Our in-house data centres run at under 50% of capacity for most of the year. For the around 20 days per year we have a massive shortage of capacity. It is wasteful to invest in hardware, rack-space and bandwidth to serve just these peak days. Cloud scalability is the answer, but some big challenges had to be overcome first:

• How to combine Cloud infrastructure with in-house data centres and load balance across the two
• How to make a complex monolithic web application work in the cloud, with great performance (avoiding communications latency back to a central database) and without a re-write of the code
• How to limit the impact on other internal systems: back office, ERP, business intelligence

Photobox has solved these problems and learned from experience how to use the cloud to give huge increases in scale, a great customer experience and lower overall running costs.

Technology evolved continuously from virtualization towards the support of sophisticated cloud computing scenarios such as cloud bursting. However, the real disruption is the business models. This keynote will explore how the engagement model between the CIO lead IT organization and the lines of business will change. This major disruption will also offer a new set of business opportunities for service providers around cloud broker services and other emerging cloud service categories.

Tomorrow this conference will be closing. A few hours later an aircraft will take off flying above the clouds. Just like most of the participants – speakers, exhibitors, and visitors – I'll be on my way home looking through the window at real clouds from an attitude of 30,000 feet… Just a moment… I'm still in the city and in a hurry to the airport. Where is the airport limo service stop? Without the limo I might be late to my flight missing MyCloud view from the window.

This is exactly the topic of this presentation – exploration of moving organizational desktops to the Cloud.

Cloud is a great promise indeed. No question. The question is: either it is THE promise or just "one more, great" promise like its predecessors remaining in our memories? "The network is the computer", "CORBA", "Java apps which are self-deliverable over the Internet", "SOA", "Web services"? Or, maybe, the Cloud promise is no more than a "deja-vu" of the green dumb "dinosaurs" from the far past? Cloud visionaries wouldn't like these memories…

However, since so many "promises" were given in the past, today everybody understands that to re-write all existing business applications from scratch is not just a naive fantasy. The delivery time make this even more hallucinational than the multi-trillion dollars required for such redevelopment. Decades of calendar years are required to replace a significant amount of real-world applications by "Google apps" styled.

Today IT stakeholders understand that "light" devices (like IPad and similar) can satisfy only basic computing functionalities, which fits the needs of some people, mainly – basic home users, those, who do not need much more than e-mails, browser and photo & audio albums. 

If we really want to touch the cloud in the visible future, standing with both feet on the ground – not just with a head in the cloud, we have to recognize that a key factor is applications. Desktop Virtualization is the best available approach to solve these issues. Although it is already getting more mature, still many barriers exist: the following problems and possible solutions will be discussed in depth: performance degradation, inability to utilize custom hardware and devices in virtualized environments, inability to work offline or standalone.

Along with the continued maturation of virtualized public cloud service offerings, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) industry has also realized substantial improvements in control over hard assets in remote datacenters, also known as the ‘bare metal cloud’.  In choosing cloud technologies, it is important to consider not only the workload to be hosted, and the type of compute environment to be employed, but also the control and orchestration of those environments as well.  Join us in a discussion evaluating the similarities and differences in the physical and virtual service offerings, as well as the benefits of leveraging a hybrid model to maximize scalability and cost efficiency.

All firms are under tremendous pressure to innovate, but continue to struggle with the demands of the current economic environment - so why can the potential benefits of cloud computing seem elusive?

Using real life case studies, entrepreneur and philanthropist Nick Chadbourne will show how, as a new business start-up, his company had to deliver IT services to 10 green field call centre sites. In 12 months his company recruited, trained and deployed over 5,000 NEETS (16-18 year olds Not in Education, Employment of Training). Highly entertaining and insightful, Nick will relive the successes and failures of this time and outline how he embraced the world of cloud computing whilst managing the demanding expectations of the workforce of the future. An honest view of the perils and benefits, this session is ideal if you are considering a move into the cloud for your organisation.

In this session we will see how Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) can expand their IaaS offering by selling Cloud based ADC services. We will first learn about the changes in the IaaS market driving CSPs to offer premium services, and see what types of new services they are now looking into offering. We will then review the different aspects of Cloud based ADC offerings in the CSP market today, and learn about the application delivery solutions Radware has to offer CSPs in the area of Cloud based ADC services, understand its main concepts, benefits and use cases.

Many Universities are faced with the problem of legacy data centres, originally funded by central government in the 1960s and 1970s, now coming to the end of their working lives. Options to resolve this include: full like-for-like refurbishment, which is expensive (£Ms) and may not meet IT growth model for the 20+ years useful life expected from a major build; or full external or cloud hosting, with challenging exit strategy, which may not appeal to risk-averse public sector senior managers.

Loughborough University has pioneered a middle way – ‘hybrid cloud’ – that does not require a large up-front local building investment, retains agility, and helps reassure risk-averse senior managers over cloud. We have spent a minimum on locally-hosted green ‘mini-pods’, with expansion paths defined for future growth into the public cloud, as well as modular expansion locally if needed.

The local installation gives a baseline to compare our local costs against remote hosting options. So far, disappointingly, pricing for public cloud infrastructure services, like for like, is greater than our local hosting costs. This suggests that suppliers may not be passing the proven large economies of scale of their industrial-scale data centres on to their customers.

This presentation will describe the Loughborough experience, and reflect on how higher education and other public sector customers might better pull together to achieve improved pricing from cloud infrastructure service providers.

Using cloud computing offers significant business benefits – both operational efficiencies and cost savings. However, organisations are proving slow to adopt it. Based on industry surveys and analysis carried out by IT integrator Fordway, the key issues preventing organisations adopting cloud computing today involve the management of risk. The majority are negated if the organisation implements private cloud for critical services and reserves public cloud for less critical services – effectively creating a hybrid cloud.

This presentation looks at how the London Borough of Hillingdon has used virtualisation to implement a private cloud solution – termed the ‘H-cloud’ – which is providing high utilisation of shared resource pools, dynamic delivery of services, increased resilience, and has created a fit for purpose infrastructure. The benefits have included significant cost and energy savings. Hillingdon runs over 90% of its servers, or 200 virtual machines, on nine physical platforms, has reduced power consumption by over 80%, thus saving > £93,000 on its annual energy bill, has reduced the three year cost per terabyte of storage by >70%, and has lowered its carbon footprint by 20% over 18 months whilst accommodating the growth required by the organisation. Hillingdon is now looking to the future and considering collaborative working and shared services, offering further cost reduction opportunities.

Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise IT by dramatically reducing the time, cost and risk of introducing new applications. Unfortunately, many of the organisations who could benefit the most from clouds do not have the advanced IT skills needed to build the scalable, reliable and secure cloud-based applications they require. To address this need, we provide a Cloud Platform - e-Science Central - that offers a set of high-level services ("cloud middleware") on which cloud applications can be built more easily. These services include data storage, scalable service execution, workflow, security and audit. It is therefore the platform, and not the application, that provides scalability and security in the cloud. The platform also addresses another major concern of those considering the use of clouds - lock-in. It runs on Amazon, Azure and private clouds, allowing applications to be moved freely between them without redesign or reimplementation. We will describe the platform and give case studies of its use across a range of applications.

IT organizations seeking to achieve the strategic promise of virtualization and to build a foundation for cloud computing tend to follow three broad strategic objectives: 

• Virtualize more of the infrastructure
• Consolidate application silos to shared pools of compute resources
• Automate provisioning and service-level processes

Increasing the overall percentage of virtualization requires organizations to deal with the challenges of virtualizing even the most critical applications that have the most demanding service-level requirements.

The benefits of virtualizing business-critical applications are many, but doing so also introduces additional challenges that must be addressed, including complexity, storage costs, availability, security, and performance.

Another critical aspect is the operational visibility, which is essential for knowing what’s going on, where the risks are, and staying in control.  

To address these types of challenges, Symantec introduced a set of technologies, new features and reference architectures that increase visibility in virtual environments: V-Ray!

We’re at Cloud Expo this year to talk about the real-life transition from virtualisation to cloud services:

Considerations for the development of your business case
Including the potential cost savings & revenue gains afforded by metering, self-provisioning & automation

Available solution options and their respective benefits
The very best open source & commercial offerings

How to guarantee a successful transition to cloud services
Practical strategies to successfully plan, implement & test your transition

Adapt’s CTO John Soanes delivers a candid session on building your own virtual private cloud. Expect some serious learning benefits and an honest comparison of cloud enablement solutions available today.

Adapt is a leading UK Managed Services Provider (MSP), delivering cloud, infrastructure management, network and data centre services to a broad customer base that includes LCH.Clearnet, Canonical, Last.fm and LOVEFiLM.

Cloud services are supposed to be more cost effective, scalable and more resource efficient than traditional services. But are they really greener? And if they are, will it ever be possible to select or optimize cloud services based on eco-efficiency criteria? Drawing on the EU’s cloud broking research project, Optimis, this presentation will examine some of the technical and commercial issues that need to be addressed before open, green services can be delivered.

Rapidly growing demand for communications and data processing has placed increased demands on IT facilities. Operators require that new data centers offer flexible specifications and ample operational capacity, modular expansion, elastic resource allocation, be green and energy efficient, have intelligent maintenance and provide tight integration with upstream and downstream industry partners for highly efficient operation. These new features can be realized through fusing the cloud computing concept, cloud computing techniques and cloud computing business model with data center design, construction and operation. Merging these concepts results in a new type of data center, the Cloud Data Center.

The presentation will focus on successful cloud projects, with a case study on a Desktop cloud/VDI project that scales to 60 000 users.

The ability to efficiently create a cloud infrastructure has been hampered by the lack of practical, cost-effective, application-driven choices for server virtualization available for your data center. Virtualization has gone well beyond the established use cases of consolidation and is now about deploying and managing mission critical applications in the most efficient way possible to serve business needs. A virtualization strategy just focused on the hypervisor to consolidate operating systems and servers may be missing the mark. Come to this session and discover "Application-Driven Virtualization" and how Oracle's virtualization solutions can enable you to effectively deploy and manage a cloud environment.

You’re migrating to the cloud. Great. Now that you’ve started, it’s time to think about management. Can you leverage your current data center best practices and tools to manage the cloud? What visibility do you need to ensure you’re getting the service you need for the price you expect from your cloud provider--public or private? Should you rely on your provider’s metrics or keep them honest by using your own tools? How can you avoid creating another technology silo that impedes cross-functional collaboration? And for service providers, what business services should you offer your customers besides vanilla infrastructure components?
Antonio Piraino will cut through the hype to answer these questions and more. Using real-world examples, he will highlight best management practices from successful cloud deployments, the need for visibility into and control of dynamic cloud resources and the role of automation in the agile enterprise. He will also provide expert guidance for service provider selection and management.

A relatively new internet start-up that has grown from zero to become a multi-million pound industry leader in just two years. A central tenant of this success has been cloud-computing - enabling low-cost agile development, great scalability and robust delivery of service. In this presentation a commercial overview will be provided about the merits and pitfalls of cloud computing and how to harness its power.

How virtualisation and shared services have helped us in reducing costs, going green and building a simplified, flexible environment able to support some pretty challenging business requirements.

The higher education sector in England is large and complex, with 130 universities and colleges, around 2 million students, 300,000 staff and a turnover of £22 billion. Cloud computing has the potential to bring significant savings to the sector. So in February this year, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced a £12.5 million programme to provide shared services in cloud computing.
The programme has two main elements:
• up to £10M in shared IT infrastructure support to deliver virtual servers, storage and data management applications. This includes a brokerage service managed by JANET(UK) to procure a shared virtual server and data centre. The brokerage is acting both within the higher education (HE) sector and between the HE sector and commercial suppliers and is currently negotiating the first major procurement under the auspices of the cloud computing programme.
• up to £2.5M for cloud computing and shared services in central administration to support the delivery of learning and teaching and research. The shared services will allow universities to benefit from aggregated purchasing and reduced implementation and hosting costs, and streamlined processes. For example, under this strand we are funding a service for the secure distribution of electronic documents such as degree certificates and transcripts to run on a cloud hosted platform.
Notes
Further information available on the HEFCE Cloud programme at: www.hefce.ac.uk/finance/shared/cloud
HEFCE distributes public money for teaching, research and related activities. In 2010-11 HEFCE will distribute over £7.4 billion.
JanetUK supports the UK's academic digital network.

Do we cloud the issue?

● How do we evaluate cloud?
○ the 4 Elements
■ Economy
■ Efficiency
■ Effectiveness
■ Environment
.....cloud providers are taking up the challenge and providing
measurable benefits across the 4 Es

● Contracting....our new role
○ Transition
○ Running operations

● Operational excellence....So what? What is the issue?....
We will soon have a sufficiently mature cloud market to enable operational excellence to be realised if we collaborate .......and work on back office shared services.....but what else could we enable with the cloud?....
We don't have to make capital expenditure and we will pay on a utility basis ....this allows us to be talent scouts and use our new playground of applications and tools .....and we can do more things, more quickly and show our personality and values by the choices we make.

The development of publically available Cloud computing resources combined with the Internet and the increasing availability of public data has made possible the development of a whole range of public or social services that promise to greatly empower and enrich the lives of citizens. Indeed, properly exploited, we believe these services could realise many of the visions inherent in current proposals concerning the Big Society.

In this talk we will set out an agenda to create, in the UK, an Electronic Big Society that would promote public involvement and engagement in a whole range of civic and public activities. This Electronic Big Society would comprise a range of public data-sharing communities associated with but not operated by the key Public Services or Agencies in Social Care, Health, Education and Local Government. We will set out the vision of an Electronic Big Society, discuss the Internet technologies that have made its construction feasible, give examples of Internet Big Society communities and outline a programme of government and community actions that would make its creation possible.

Cloud promises new efficiencies, greater business agility and the transformation of IT from a cost center to a service provider mindset. But, as we all realize, transforming enterprise culture into its new incarnation requires a change in how we think. This latest generation of technology will radically challenge the traditional views of “hug my server,” physical and static controls, and localization of infrastructure.
Is your organization ready for the cultural and relationship changes that Cloud will cause? Will a one-size-fits-all governance model work for Cloud? Are you living in denial and think that this will pass quietly in the night? How does your skillset stack up in this time of transition and which service providers do you choose to help?
Let’s have an open and relevant discussion on culture, governance, and the role of the CIO in leading the transformation to Cloud enablement.

Presentation outline:
•    Why is Cloud seen as a disruptive technology?
•    Will culture kill your strategy? How to assess and correct
•    Next gen governance, moving from static to dynamic controls
•    Grief counseling for the CIO
•    Looking ahead: mobility, Cloud and big data and the required new  skillset

Automobiles make it easy for an ordinary human to travel long distances. Although they’re easy to operate, the underlying technology is incredibly complex and cloud is no different. Businesses have options in the rush to achieve the efficiency and simplicity promised by cloud, but evaluating those options diverts resources from core business productivity.  Hexagrid will briefly introduce the options with the advantages and disadvantages of each; build an in-house cloud, buy an already-built cloud, or select an appropriate service provider solution.  In any scenario, the goal should be to keep resources focused on growing business productivity and revenues.  Although there are differences between traditional IT models and cloud models, these should not distract your organization from its core business.  

In this presentation Hexagrid will discuss common concerns and misconceptions of enterprise IT when evaluating cloud options as well as common hold-ups that stop businesses from simply and efficiently transitioning to cloud.  From hardware and software to accountability and security, Hexagrid will discuss those issues that cause the most surprise and/or consternation amongst newcomers. We will also discuss how enterprises have successfully addressed these issues to achieve their cloud objectives more easily and cost-effectively.

According to Gartner, the future of Cloud Computing is set to move towards the concept of Hybrid Cloud management. Third Generation Cloud is about giving control back to the IT manager allowing you to benefit from the agility and flexibility that Hybrid Cloud Management provides - enabling you to manage your Virtual Data Centre on the go, from any device.

VMware’s vCloud Director provides complete Hybrid Management and full control of your systems from anywhere with an Internet connection. In this session, get a snap shot into the future of the Cloud and see how vCloud Director could transform your business systems.

Over the last 4 years Commensus have helped over 300 customers move their servers onto our Private Cloud platform and this year we are one of the first Cloud providers to offer Hybrid Management with all virtual servers. If you’re thinking about moving into the Cloud then this session is one not to miss.

Are the days of buying separate server, storage and networking components coming to an end? Some vendors would have you think so. In 2009, Cisco rocked the server industry with the introduction of its first server products under the moniker “Unified Computing System”. The idea was to re-invent the overall concept of the server by closely integrating network and storage resources into the same package, so that they could be managed together. Two years on, the concept of system convergence is starting to catch on with real customers, especially service providers offering Cloud-based services and enterprises implementing private Clouds. It’s a good time to assess how things are panning out and what course they are likely to take over the next 12 to 18 months.

Andy Brewerton, EVault Country Manager for Northern Europe will be presenting previously unpublished data on how UK SMEs are managing disaster recovery. The presentation will look at the scale of data loss and the cost to UK business. It will draw a comparison between on- and off-premise restored IT environments and offer industry standards for defining and evaluating data recovery plans. This will include best practice guidelines for identifying and managing business critical data to ensure its protection and round-the-clock availability, and advice on preventing data loss from employee mobile devices.

Trust is the key characteristic of the cloud service consumer-provider model” – this Gartner statement is more valid then ever. How can trust and confidence in the cloud be achieved? What are the essential elements and steps towards Confidence in the Cloud?
Learn about the Symantec cloud strategy, deployments methods and new security innovations and understand how the various cloud building blocks support the recommendations of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) for secure Cloud Computing.

FireHost's Senior Security Engineer will discuss the need for acute awareness to secure data in the Cloud, and how the advancement of the environment has also accelerated the way this technology can be breached.  The session will also include case studies on attacks and what you need to be asking yourself and your provider.

Hear how leading financial institutions, governments and social networking organizations are using multi-factor authentication through smartphones and other mobile devices to secure everyday transactions, customer accounts and drive identity assurance in the Cloud. 
The presentation will explain multi-layered security approaches that do not rely on a simple shared secret.  These new methods feature various combinations of different authentication techniques: something you have (a device), something you know (a PIN or passphrase), something you are (multi-modal biometrics such as face or voice) and even somewhere you are (GPS).  Learn how these technologies can be used to supplement any security system by making a simple web service call to the host server.
This presentation explores how multi-factor, out-of-band, technology and risk-based approaches are being used to deliver highly configurable solutions that address the security threats so prevalent today.  Attendees will gain an understanding of how smart phones are providing an authentication device that is becoming ubiquitous even as it continues to evolve; how out-of band solutions can help prevent “man-in-the-middle” and similar attacks; how risk-based approaches to multi-factor authentication provide resilience through the flexibility to change security policies on the fly in response to future threats; and how consumers are the ultimate winners in this convergence of technologies and popular culture. 

Suppliers are making Cloud computing services more and more attractive to users such as CIOs and their line managers. These low-cost, pay-per-use services promise flexibility, cost-cutting and scalability. However, Cloud Computing presents information risk - maybe not significantly more than in a traditional outsourced environment. But how secure are they to use and what steps are taken by both suppliers and users to safeguard and minimise risks to privacy and loss of sensitive data? What are the legal and commercial aspects; will data remain within the geographical constraints of your legal and compliance obligations?

Today, Cloud Service Providers and telcos are building their IaaS offerings and developing a complete services portfolio. Successful providers will foster a strong cloud ecosystem, helping partners and customers migrate their application to their IaaS platform. They will build a market place where ISVs and enterprises can participate either as application designers or as consumers : an Apple-style «App Store» for their cloud. The App Store enables designers to create or clone image templates, but also to share and collaborate with partners.
What are the challenges for Cloud Service Providers when building a software market place? How can ISVs and software designers easily package their applications to make them ready for publishing on the market place? How can ISVs and enterprises migrate applications to the cloud while keeping control of software governance? This session provides an overview of the challenges in the field and the tools needed to build an app store, migrate applications and maintain software on the cloud.

As cloud services mature, customers are shopping around for the best solution. Customers are asking how can they ensure their data is secure, how can they trust their cloud service provider when they want to exclude all risk and how do they get their data back or move it to another provider? In a crowded market, cloud service providers and resellers are looking for ways to stand out from their competitors by offering some of these protections to customers without taking on too much risk. This session will clarify how providers and resellers can offer protections in their customer contracts by adopting best practice recommendations promoted by the Cloud Industry Forum. These range from transparency and accountability regarding the location of data centres, documenting their management systems and processes, and clearly stating which of the customer’s losses a cloud provider will cover. 

The rise of the cloud model is revolutionising outsourcing – but the cost advantages potentially to be gained by end-users present an existential challenge to providers looking to protect revenues. In this presentation, I will address this challenge and its impact upon the provider market and the client/vendor relationship, looking at current and potential solutions and investigating how the coming of the cloud may shape the outsourcing space of the future. I will also discuss how these developments are combining with other trends, both technological and otherwise, to create a perfect storm of change in outsourcing and highlight some of the consequent challenges facing buyers looking to secure the best outcomes for their organisations.

While the cloud is becoming more and more present in today’s enterprises, security remains the number one reason holding organizations back from embracing the cloud and its benefits.  Concerns are raised about security and privacy around the storage and access to data.  More specifically, these concerns are related to key management, server location and access to data by 3rd party services.  With the benefits of the cloud being widely recognized, it is not surprising we have seen many companies moving to some kind of cloud solution. Having said that, hacking incidents and recent controversies on the actual level of security available within cloud-based applications have driven corporations to think twice about putting their sensitive business information in the cloud. In this session we will look at the history of the cloud and identify the pain points related to security. We will then look at current and upcoming challenges to enjoying the benefits of the cloud while at the same time, managing the risks.  We will detail the thought process that we went though at I Think Security from the needs analysis, to the security framework and finally the final product to bring convenience to the user while having robust security for document storage in the cloud.

Whether you provide Cloud Backup, Disaster Recovery or Hosting services, you have unique access to your customers data. That same access can be leveraged to provide other valuable and secure services that can significantly improve your customer’s productivity and reduce the cost of data retention and compliance. This session will show how you can streamline backup and DR processes and extend your service catalogue into the Information Management and Enterprise Search space.

Today's fast-moving business environment is driving enterprise adoption of cloud computing to achieve greater agility, scalability and economy in the IT infrastructure. Starting from first principles of successful cloud architectures, this session will outline the practical steps data center operators can take to fulfil those needs by delivering high-performance, reliable cloud computing with flexible provisioning and efficient, cost-effective operations.

Deploying and managing enterprise-class connectivity for branch offices and teleworkers, can be expensive and complex, it can belimited in functionality and vulnerable to security breaches.
 
Join Phil Keeley, to learn how you can outwit this trade-off between cost and quality, and benefit from:
 
On demand connectivity and advanced networking features across hundreds of thousands of sites
Layer 2-7 corporate policy enforcement
Enterprise-class network visibility and troubleshooting
Centrally provisioned and managed via Aerohive’s cloud services platform
• Enabled cloud based VPN services leveraging industry leaders such as Barracuda and Websense to secure the remote locations
without the need to invest in hardware or excessive internet links.
 
Aerohive is redefining the economics, control, and performance of small branch and teleworker connectivity, helping businesses to deliver a ‘headquarters-like’ network to every user regardless of location.

Interxion will share their customer insights on cloud usage and adoption in European markets.

Are you aware of the new reality that cloud computing is bringing to bear for service providers and systems integrator? In cloud, the traditional technology suppliers are now interfacing directly with the customer, and the channel's "value add" of technology delivery, solutions development and customer relationship management is being seriously threatened.  Or is there more and will the reinvention of everything we have done in IT create new opportunities.

This isn't new, of course, but from Interxion point of view its reboot and power on.

What knowledge will the attendee gain or benefit from attending your session?
In this presentation, attendees will learn how:

• In the cloud, connectivity is king; in a cloud world, load sharing exponentially increases the connectivity requirements.

• Important robust data centres are for supporting cloud infrastructures, despite popular belief that the cloud eliminates the need for data centres.

• Carrier-neutral data centres are the only sustainable data centre model in a cloud-based world.

• Colocation data centres satisfy a basic requirement to access useful information, quickly, at lowest cost and with minimized risk of disruption.

Cloud computing has received a lot of attention over the last few years and for good reason, it can give businesses a huge boost in productivity, while cutting overheads. At Virgin Media Business, we believe in a no nonsense approach to cloud. We’re always looking to cut through the hype and jargon associated with the cloud computing market and actually provide useful advice and simple, powerful technology.

Putting data and applications into the cloud, whether that’s public, private or hybrid, can be quite a simple process and revolutionise a business’ IT environment.  However, every business needs to consider three key areas when courting the cloud. In this session Andrew Perrin will discuss the challenges that cloud computing brings and how they can be overcome, including:

•      Connectivity: It’s one thing to have your data and applications in the cloud, it’s another entirely to have network performance and availability guarantees – what do you need as a business and what should you demand from a supplier?
•      Assurance: Your data doesn’t reside in-house any more, but what can you do to ensure that it’s safe secure and always available to the right people?
•      Infrastructure: Maybe you want to move into the cloud, but you currently have a complex internal IT infrastructure. How can you go about migrating to the cloud in a controlled and logical way?

“The Mayor will encourage all London boroughs to adopt Love Clean London, a mobile and online reporting and recording system for graffiti, fly-tipping and other quality of life issues. The Mayor wants Londoners to be informed and empowered when it comes to quality of life and the quality of the local environment. He is keen for Londoners to have more information on their environment and to improve the processes for reporting environmental crime. To that end, in February 2011, the Mayor launched a London specific mobile and online reporting and recording tool called Love Clean London. Love Clean London is based on the London Borough of Lewisham’s Love Clean Streets programme. It allows Londoners and council workers to photograph and upload images such as a fly tip or graffiti, either via a smart phone application, a mobile phone SMS or directly on to the website. In Love Clean London, the reports will be sent to a central portal to be directed to the appropriate London borough for recording and action. The public can then request an update as to when the issue has been resolved. The tool also enables the public to upload images of areas or incidents they have cleared or cleaned themselves, promoting social responsibility and community spirit. 

Love Clean London enables local authorities to target their workload more effectively with the public becoming their eyes on the ground. Further savings can be realised by integrating the tool into back office services and by reducing the number of reports made in more costly ways, such as by telephone. The Mayor has written to all London borough leaders to encourage them to support him in the London-wide rollout of this reporting system.”

We’re at Cloud Expo this year to talk about the real-life transition from virtualisation to  cloud services:

Considerations for the development of your business case
Including the potential cost savings & revenue gains afforded by metering, self-provisioning & automation

Available solution options and their respective benefits
The very best open source & commercial offerings

How to guarantee a successful transition to cloud services
Practical strategies to successfully plan, implement & test your transition

Adapt’s CTO John Soanes delivers a candid session on building your own virtual private cloud. Expect some serious learning benefits and an honest comparison of cloud enablement solutions available today.

Adapt is a leading UK Managed Services Provider (MSP), delivering cloud, infrastructure management, network and data centre services to a broad customer base that includes LCH.Clearnet, Canonical, Last.fm and LOVEFiLM.

London-based Cloud hosting and professional services business DNS Europe have built a successful world-wide Cloud business based exclusively on CA's AppLogic platform. During this session, Stephen Hurford, Cloud services director and Jonathan Davis, CTO for DNS Europe will present how they established an impressive growth rate during the past 3 years, during some of the toughest financial times the European MSP market has ever faced. DNS Europe will share insights into their strategic planning and service development roadmap as well as offering practical advice on how you can launch new Cloud services on AppLogic within 30 days.

Case Study: Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure in the Cloud helps Segmetrix create Match2Lists.com and automate B2B data matching, de-duplicating and merging in the cloud. Segmetrix will explain how DaaS Cloud has enabled them to overcome significant hurdles in dealing with the large, complex market and client data managed by their business insight solutions. Segmetrix will showcase their on-demand products that transform data complexity into visual simplicity.

Cloud systems promise virtually unlimited, on-demand increases in storage, compute, and bandwidth. As companies have turned to cloud-based services to store, manage and access big data, it has become clear that this promise is tempered by a series of technical bottlenecks: transfer performance over the WAN, HTTP throughput within remote infrastructures and size limitations of the cloud object stores.
Designed as scalable distributed object stores, systems target applications requiring simple read/write operations of binary "blobs" of data, and should work well for storing large numbers of files. However, the "blobs" can be limited in size and the data access interfaces use standard HTTP protocol, constraining speeds to fractions of available bandwidth at distance.
In this presentation, Michelle Munson, Aspera CEO, president and co-founder, will discuss principles of cloud object stores, using examples of Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack Swift, and performance benchmarks of their native HTTP I/O. She will share best practices in orchestration of complex, large-scale big data workflows, describe requirements and challenges of such IT infrastructure designs (on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid), including integration of necessary high-speed transport technologies to power ultra-high speed data movement, and adoption of appropriate high-performance network-attached storage systems.

A brief summary of current trends reported within the Document Management space will be used to explore the challenges and risks of a technology led strategy, moving documents out of storage to triggering business process, enabling user self service, managing document lifecycles and exploiting the benefits of cloud solutions.
                                                                                                                                                             
A Live business application will show how moving out of the box into the cloud has transformed HR management for a leading UK organisation delivering real business benefits, measurable savings and business process improvement. This will also show how aligning the process to good records management practice results in immediate  benefits creating a robust platform that reports on non-conformities and ensures statutory compliance including eligibility to work in the UK, data protection, retention management and timely destruction of records.

The high levels of activity surrounding the British standards arena on cloud will be linked and summarised to reveal the current thinking and approach to security, personal information, records management and more.

Customers silently appreciate a business that meets their expectations, however they complain very loudly on the occasions where they have been let down or disappointed. So when it comes to making changes to their business infrastructure, companies often have a rising sense of anxiety. Why? Because historically, updates to their systems have resulted in unforeseen issues impacting customer satisfaction.
 
In partnership with Telehouse, Datapoint will share the journey it has taken to address this problem for contact centres of all sizes. It is also an opportunity to find out how the Cloud can now provide the tools and information for “Contact Optimised Contact Centres” across the market. Through the Cloud, any organisation with a customer service function can now achieve low cost insight into the actions required to eliminate the anxiety.

Learn about how Cloud is not just about sharing servers any more.  Whether you're looking for a DIY Cloud, a Cloud that comes with support, a hybrid Cloud or your very own Cloud, come to find out more about which best suits your requirements.  Hear how customers are using the Cloud, and the different types of Cloud available to you and your business.

Computing cloud has revolutionised the way in which people can access computing resources in the same way the internet made information immediately accessible anywhere nearly 20 years ago. But can the benefits that an open access cloud brings really coexist with the control and data security that enterprises need outside in a hosted cloud environment? Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, strips back the Cloud to show how it’s possible to combine Enterprise style public cloud simplicity, with private Data Centre security on controllable flexible and cost effective platform.

Cloud computing benefits are being recognised by business organisations around the globe. It helps organisations achieve greater efficiency through increased utilisation and automation, and reduced capital costs. Cloud computing increases agility by empowering organisations to respond more quickly to rapidly-changing business conditions, all while maintaining control over the availability, reliability, scalability and security of their workloads.

Techgate and VMware jointly present the characteristics of secure Infrastructure-as-a-Service and how to benefit from migrating to a Trusted Cloud.

 The Cloud revolution is dramatically impacting the traditional IT supply chains – Vendors and “Cloud Aggregators” are now competing with you to service your client, and the time has to come to draw the battle lines and take your stand.

Rob Lovell - CEO of ThinkGrid - looks at the trends, threats and opportunities present in the market today, and questions how channel partners will need to adapt to survive and prosper in these new conditions.

Wireline, wireless, and converged operators are evaluating, refining, and deploying their cloud strategies. Rather than one size fits all, such strategies depend on the size, footprint, starting point, and objectives of the operator.  We will review the approaches being used by leading operators, and best practices to accelerate revenue growth, enhance competitive positioning, reduce cost, and enhance operator agility.

With more than 70 operational customers running CloudStack as their Cloud platform (Apple, Bechtel, Tata,  Zynga, Korea Telecom, SingTel, Nokia, etc.), CloudStack is the market leading cloud orchestration & monetization technology provider. 

In this session we will show you how our customers deployed their cloud environment for internal use or public IaaS offerings. Learn through real life examples how to build your cloud offering, model your architecture for scalability  and how we can dramatically help reduce cost and implementation time for your cloud project.

If you have already a cloud, are in the process of building one or planning to do so, this session will give you some fresh idea’s to improve, accelerate and get going !

Cloud Computing is transforming the way IT is bought and used. A ‘Perfect Storm’ of conditions make it irresistible: economic, technological and cultural. Cloud’s service-driven, usage-based consumption model is turning traditional IT cost centers into service delivery organizations. Enterprise end users expect to enjoy as good IT at work as they do as consumers. How are end users meeting these goals and what are hosting providers, telcos, IT vendors and integrators doing to support them?

NaviSite will present its view of cloud as a converged infrastructure as a service platform.  Via AppCentre, NaviCloud allows user to control all aspects of the virtual data centre including compute, storage and layer 4-7 services such as firewalls and load balancers.  The underlying physical architecture will be explained and demonstration of the IaaS offering will be provided.

Learn how enterprises are creating process-driven web applications that improve business productivity by automating business workflows, making data actionable, enabling social collaboration, mobilizing information access and empowering end-user customizations.

Practical real-world examples using the LongJump process-driven application platform:

•  Enterprise Architects are aligning business and technology strategy and providing business users with reporting, analytics, and customization capabilities.

• System Architects and IT developers are deploying process applications cost effectively, utilizing enterprise security with centralized control of IT.

Navigating the subject of Cloud can be very confusing, and there is no one size fits all model.  Attend this session for a clear and impartial industry led understanding of Cloud terminology, definitions, examples, and guide to translating cloud-speak!

Recognising Cloud is not a universal solution for every organisation, this seminar focuses on how to assess the right deployment model for cloud services to meet your organisation’s needs and how to scope it as part of a wider IT strategy.

This presentation will focus on the key issues to be taken into consideration when sourcing a cloud service in order to ensure a good match between the providers capabilities and your organisations needs.  The aim is to provide practical advice on the issues to seek clarification on and how to spot best practice.

Cloud will typically be part of most organisations IT capability, but not necessarily the whole. Equally many cloud service or deployment models may be used as part of an overall strategy.  So with IT no longer constrained by the traditional server room and firewall, how do you begin to understanding the evolution of accountability, controls and governance in a cloud enabled environment? This presentation will provide guidance to end users.

Cloud is arguably more about business transformation and enablement than it is about technology.  However, to make sure organisations are able to achieve their objectives it is essential to understand the terms on which services are provided, the obligations of each party and the pitfalls to avoid.  This presentation will dive into key issues such as these  as well as SLA’s, term, on-boarding and exit, liabilities and jurisdictions.

What Standards are appropriate for Cloud Service Providers and cloud service users? Which programmes exist for technical, security, interoperability and commercial trust? and what is the landscape looking like for the evolution of standards and Best practice.