Whether you’re currently transitioning towards the cloud, already a seasoned multi-cloud professional or operating a hybrid approach, a cloud first strategy is one that can deliver competitive advantage and true transformation. So how can you design a strategy that maximises business value, hits compliance on the head and overcomes barriers to adoption? This stream will answer these questions as well as how you can take control of your cloud environments using software, automation, policy and people.

On hearing the words skills or culture, you might instantly think of your HR or learning department leading the charge, but that mindset needs to change. As leaders and cloud adopters, the digital capability of the workforce needs to be on your agenda - how will you meet the challenge? Cultural considerations are a must too, from fostering an environment for optimal development (we’ve all heard of DevOps) to bringing people on-board with change. Finally, bringing all this together across the enterprise with global and disparate teams; all this will be addressed here.

With multi-cloud deployments, we’re seeing the role and responsibilities of the IT team shift as they juggle multiple vendors, orchestrate implementation and integrate various services across the organisation. With all these challenges, this stream will showcase how to overcome these in consideration of customer experience and future scaling needs. It will also address: mapping your services and types of workloads, using APIs for integration gaps, developing an automation framework and executing across different environments and networking requirements to prevent disruption and chaos.

With the pressure on infrastructure leaders mounting, this stream will look to alleviate some of the headaches: How do we mitigate the challenges of virtualisation? Is IaaS the most effective way forward? Who owns and controls the data? How do we ensure compliance and security in a regulated industry? This will be addressed with the latest industry developments and solutions including the impact of next generation infrastructure.

With the increase of IoT devices and a plethora of data, edge computing is making more business sense than ever.  Whether highlighting real time performance or reducing the costs of processing data in the cloud, it’s time to develop your edge strategy. But that’s not all, also hear about the risks and considerations, as well as integration opportunities with AI and machine learning.

Protecting your data and systems is a top concern, especially with the regular news headlines highlighting the latest compromise. Although high on the priority list, it can be challenging to detect and address vulnerabilities without full control over the infrastructure and storage. This stream will look at mitigating risk, defining each party’s responsibilities, as well as a successful governance framework to keep cloud security watertight.

Legacy applications can only hinder a business in meeting its needs so an upgrade is a high priority. Exploring DevOps methodology, microservices and PaaS, what is needed to modernise the application estate and develop a new suite of applications? Where do the challenges lie? And how does this impact application management and having visibility over performance? These issues and many more will be discussed including a focus on the latest tools and platforms to support this.

Born from the demand for faster and more efficient networks, NGN are currently pressured by the likes of increasing mobility, next generation networks is the next development to plug into. With software-defined networking and network function virtualisation (NFV) topping the subject matter chart, this stream will address how NGN will impact and super charge these. In addition it will explore how, in support of edge computing and distributed cloud architecture, organisations can capitalise on decreased latency but improved performance.

The cloud is driving more full scale AI implementations and the application of this in enterprise companies is emerging. This stream will of course bring to life the latest case studies in machine learning, but will also highlight the lesser discussed deep neural networks and their application. Scaling your pilot, integration into cloud based software and the expertise and resources needed to take full advantage will be hot topics too. Not to mention discussions on centralised cloud and supporting the demands of the future, or whether a decentralised approach to managing data will reap greater benefits.

Investment in the channel is growing as competition for enterprise clients gets tougher for hyperscale providers. Channel partners are evermore important with organisations increasingly opting for multi cloud and hybrid environments. As providers start raising the maturity of their model, this stream will consider how partners can secure that additional investment, differentiate their offering, market themselves and build trust with the hyperscalers.

The culture and performance of DevOps teams is critical to sustainable success. Presently, however, teams are still being hampered by communication gaps and departments each operating as the project lead rather than sharing the load. This stream will discover how to breakdown these silos, improve communication between the development and security teams and change up sprint retrospectives to be more effective and simulate motivation. All in all, be inspired to share learning experiences, common goals and have greater integration between teams.

By now, we’ve all heard of DevSecOps, but how do we foster an environment where we can safely deliver codes in an agile architecture? We will consider the key elements to secure this landscape including approaches to continuous feedback, deploying automation - both developed in house and using open source tools. This stream will go further and explore the successes and challenges from organisations using machine learning and how to create a testing environment without impacting the customer.

There is currently a surge in machine learning and AI deployment across cloud native environments and microservices. From test automation, ML in Kubernetes to the intelligence layer that is continuous verification; it’s clear that, if not already, machine learning should be your top priority. But what are the other trends and challenges in this environment and what are the key learnings from like-minded DevOps teams? Hear all this and more.

In a large organisation, DevOps teams might be constrained to the formalities of the IT department, but that doesn’t mean agile is out the window. Using case study examples, this stream will tackle the main challenges in enterprise DevOps from adoption, scaling in highly regulated environments, orchestration and ensuring on-time delivery.

This stream is all about the latest trends, tools and myth debunking. It will consider the latest use cases of AIOps and the unique challenges when compared to AL and ML. Also, learn all things DataOps, from organisations that have increased revenue, driven efficiencies and customer experience as well as faced hurdles in data quality. Join us to see what will be next on your DevOps to-do list and how to navigate the current trends.