451 Keynote & Sector Overview

Post-COVID, Cloud is the Land of Milk and Honey

Over the course of a year, bee colonies faces challenges from deadly viruses to clumsy badgers. Even with the best of planning, the unexpected happens and wise beekeepers plan for the worst – resiliency, interoperability, and scalability allows the beekeeper to adapt to change. Cloud’s ability to scale to meet demand for video conferencing, TV streaming, e-commerce and home working, has allowed society to carry-on during Covid-19, even though our everyday lives are not once they what were. Like beekeepers, enterprises that planned for the worst are best placed to weather and even embrace the unexpected -- and harvest the sweetest honey.

Presenters: Owen Rogers, Melanie Posey, William Fellows

Panel Session

Cloud Native: Clouds, Containers and Kubernetes

Clouds, containers and microservices are dramatically increasing the velocity of customer-facing value creation and overall service delivery. They sit strategically at the top of the list of IT technologies viewed as most transformative. The C-suite now points to cloud-native as a weapon it will bring to the fight against variables such as uncertainty and rapidly changing market conditions. This viewpoint was born prior to COVID-19 – which brings all those variables in spades. However, a Cambrian explosion of cloud native goods and services has delivered a market which is thrashing, crowded and there is lots of confusion. Successful approaches will need to find the right combinations of these and operationalize them to deliver the benefits as advertised by their suppliers – speed, scale, agility and cost. This panel will explore how cloud native technologies including Kubernetes, serverless and service mesh can support this.

Presenter: William Fellows

Panelists: HPE

Panel Session

A quantum leap or an entangled dream?

Quantum computing is touted by proponents as being transformative for high performance and scientific computing, with effects felt in finance, material science, cryptography, and other disciplines. Despite high hopes for quantum computing among researchers, practical quantum computers are just now leaving the domain of university research laboratories and being assimilated into the cloud – developers can experiment on these systems but deriving business value from present-day (near-term) quantum computers may be years away.

Presenter: James Sanders

451 Keynote & Sector Overview

Global Datacenter Market Growth and Misalignment

The many datacenter markets around the globe continue to see growth, but that growth is not spread evenly. In this keynote session we’ll take a look at what regions and specific markets are growing the quickest, the reasons for this growth, as well as potential threats to it. Additionally, our most recent Voice of the Enterprise data illuminates some opportunities for datacenter providers to improve their messaging to the enterprise segment. Why do enterprises elect for colocation over in-house datacenters, the cloud, and other venues? Are there services that datacenter providers could offer to increase their value in light of this? Perhaps even more importantly, if companies are choosing to not use colocation, why?"

Presenters: Dan Thompson, Rahiel Nasir, Jia Lyn Low

Panel session

Datacenter M&A

With the rapid growth of cloud adoption, service providers and investors alike have looked at ways to participate in that growth, e.g., by investing in datacenters, interconnect platforms and a variety of service providers that offer cloud-related services. In this panel we will discuss how M&A has contributed to the growth of Invisible Infrastructure and what types of companies will continue to be targets of investment or M&A activity. Join our distinguished panel of finance experts as we discuss key questions such as: Who will continue to invest in these sectors? Are any types of infrastructure likely to become less visible/appealing to investors? What firms will be targets? Are networks and datacenters attractive than services and software providers? How are assets being valued? What financing is available and on what terms? We will debate these and more as we explore trends impacting this dynamic sector.

Presenters: Kelly Morgan, Jonathan Schroth

Panelists: Deutsche Bank, Bank Street

Panel session

The Future of Datacenter Networking and Interconnection

Once the weakest link in the application delivery Holy Trinity, the network is now more capable of supporting the latest advances in container networks, app performance and security. As networks and interconnection points increasingly turn to intelligent automation to transform static resources into programmable assets, how will the capabilities and price/ performance of network components and infrastructure change? Join us as we discuss trends in networking and interconnection and what enterprises, datacenter operators, network providers and others need to know to optimize their network and data strategies.

Presenters: Craig Matsumoto and Mike Fratto

451 Keynote & Sector Overview

Cyber Security in 2020: Navigating long-term change, riding out near-term storms

2020 may not have been the year we thought it would be, but cyber security remains a top enterprise priority regardless, in both good times and bad. And if there’s one aspect of that priority that stands out, it’s the shift away from physical infrastructure and toward the cloud. In 451 Research’s 2020 Voice of the Enterprise Information Security Budgets and Outlook study, 22% of respondents plan to reduce spending on hardware-based security solutions, while 26% of security budgets are going toward securing cloud computing. Cloud introduces new opportunities in areas such as security analytics and operations, taking advantage of scale, elasticity and responsiveness to bring new techniques within the reach of a far larger audience. But cloud has introduced challenges as well. Many security teams remain ill equipped, both in terms of technology and expertise, to best cope with what is new and different about IT in the cloud. The role of security in a DevOps environment, for example, is still evolving, while open source and automation present both opportunities and challenges in tackling complexity and scale in developing, deploying and securing new environments.

In the midst of this, the coronavirus pandemic introduced unforeseen impact on security decisions in 2020. How is security architecture and practice adapting? How can we overcome lost security visibility and telemetry, when so many must work away from traditional business settings? And what are the challenges facing security tomorrow, as technologies such as 5G promise to expand the attack surface with billions of new devices and systems virtually anywhere technology can reach?

Presenters: Scott Crawford, Dan Kennedy

Panel session

The infinite game of cybersecurity: Why technology and service providers are adding advanced security services to their portfolios

When we ask organizations about their biggest concerns, cybersecurity is often at the top of the list. When we ask which area of the business is seeing the largest budget increases, again cybersecurity is at or near the top of the list. In fact, cybersecurity at or near the top of many lists – biggest pain, largest shortage of expertise, most important workload-related challenge – just to name a few. Sensing the shifting tides towards services and the growing demand for security, vendors of every type – data center providers, technology vendors, professional service firms, VARs, and others - are examining how they can add advanced security services to their lineup. At the same time, existing security service providers, like MDR providers, are rapidly evolving their capabilities to keep pace with the expanding and changing threat landscape and to add value to security teams that are beyond detection and response Approaches to delivering security services vary. What works well for one company may not for another. In this session, we will examine various approaches and challenges to delivering security services.

Presenters: Aaron Sherrill

Panelists: eSentire

Virtual Roundtable

Has COVID-19 and the work-from-home (WFH) phenomenon helped or hurt the adoption of Zero Trust in the enterprise? What are the key uses driving adoption of Zero Trust?

As adoption of cloud, mobility and IoT have accelerated digital transformation, they have also eroded the foundations of the traditional perimeter-based security model. In its place, a new model based upon principles of zero trust (assume no one is trusted, assign access based on least privilege) has garnered considerable attention, but few examples of real-world adoption. This virtual panel will discuss the benefits and obstacles to rolling out zero trust in the enterprise, the impact that Covid-19 and WFH have posed and key use case driving adoption of Zero Trust such as remote application access, cloud migration and the emergence of ‘cloud-native’ technologies.

Presenters: Garrett Bekker, Fernando Montenegro

Panelists: Appgate

451 Keynote & Sector Overview

Using data, AI and analytics to try and understand the ‘new normal’

Executive recognition of the role data, AI and analytics play in driving transformation has never been greater as enterprises look to improve their operational efficiency and accelerate out of the Covid-19 lockdown. The pandemic has changed the behavior of customers, employees, suppliers and partners, as well as the technology investment landscape in terms of M&A, IPOs and VC and private equity investment. While Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of data, it has also challenged the reliance on analytic models to make sense of unprecedented socio-economic changes when historical data sets used to train those models are no longer relevant. This session examines changing attitudes to data and analytics, the emergence of new products and services and the changing investment landscape as organizations strive to continue to make data-driven decisions in an altered landscape.

Presenters: Matt Aslett, Nick Brenon

Panel session

Database migration patterns and hybrid IT

Databases have been adopted in the cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) for many years but we have are now seeing an uptick in adoption, especially for production workloads, fueled by the emergence of new managed service products and services. While an increasing number of database workloads are being deployed in cloud services, the majority of existing databases are on-premises. Not all database workloads will make it to the cloud and migration patterns vary. This session looks at the various approaches to database workload adoption and the migration patterns for database workloads, as well as the reasons why some existing workloads are remaining on-premises and why even some new workloads are being deployed on traditional server infrastructure.

Moderator: Matt Aslett

Panel session

Automation, Bots & Mining: The AI-enabled Intelligent Digital Business

Process and task automation have become top priorities in the digital transformation strategies of nearly all organizations. But automation itself isn't sufficient. It must add new value through data-driven analysis that makes processes, designers and users smarter and more productive. AI technology represents new, pragmatic means to gain an edge, and industry leaders are exploiting it to enable intelligent process automation.

In the digital business era, it is insufficient to pursue automation as a mere means to reduce redundant and repeatable manual activities, or to do things faster by streamlining processes and reducing cycle times. AI technology is now pragmatic, and industry leaders will use it to become smarter than their competitors and create new ways to deliver value to customers. They will exploit AI to enable data-driven intelligent process automation designs; create recommendation engines that guide process stakeholders and IT professionals on how best to accomplish their tasks; automate decision-making processes consistently governed by rules, policies and compliance constraints; and analyze all this to predict change, risk and opportunity, and respond to it rapidly – or at least before rivals.

Moderator: Carl Lehman

Panel session

Is infrastructure holding back adoption of AI at scale?

Our surveys of enterprise machine learning specialists reveal that at least half of organizations believe their technology infrastructure isn’t prepared for the future demands that will be placed on it by the adoption of AI and machine learning at scale. They face challenges up and down the stack, from silicon, through storage, networking and compute bottlenecks as well as the key decisions around best execution venue – on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid. In this session Nick will examine why AI puts strains on infrastructure and how it can be overcome.

Moderator: Nick Patience

Panelists: HPE

451 Keynote & Sector Overview

Edge of Tomorrow – 5 Ways to Capitalize on the Edge Opportunity

The segments of the IoT market spending real money today in manufacturing, energy and transportation all heavily depend on edge computing for mission-critical applications. In addition, edge computing can expose a capability to power the next generation of AR/VR applications, real-time video analytics or cyber-physical systems. These emerging use cases creates an opportunity for datacenter technology vendors and service providers to supply the localized services these applications demand. This session dives into these applications, their real requirements, and the five key approaches to capitalizing on this opportunity.

Moderator: Christian Renaud

Panelist: HPE

Panel session

Interconnecting the Edge

Several parties are vying to supply the real estate and infrastructure of the edge: datacenters, telcos, startups, even the public clouds. Common to all of them is the need to bring connectivity to edge presences, some of which might land in unpredictable locations. This calls for flexible, cloud-native networking. This session will examine how DevOps and SDN can feed this newly distributed environment and what roles these different players can expect to take at the edge.

Moderator: Craig Matsumoto

Panel session

Playing to Win in the 5G Era

After several years of building 5G anticipation we are at the beginning of decade long transition for the telecom industry. The race is now on amongst operators and countries to build the best 5G platforms and economies. 5G’s raw network performance and flexibility enabled by innovations such as multi-access edge computing (MEC), cloud-native platforms, virtual RAN and network slicing will open entirely new markets and value chains for the 5G network builders. New opportunities span public and private network deployment options and CBRS availability in the United States adds to 5G’s viability. Equally enticing are the opportunities the 5G transition will bring to the wide ICT eco-system including managed services, cloud services, interconnect, digital infrastructure, co-location, and all the way to the device edge. Those opportunities include serving telcos, their customers or using 5G to enable their own services. 5G challenges such as managing energy impact, network complexity, and edge computing systems translate to new opportunities for vendors serving telecom customers. This session will explore the current states of affairs around 5G including the business case, expected service and segment focus and timing, overall network, IT, and datacenter readiness, wider eco-system opportunities, and the energy impact.

Moderator: Brian Partridge

451 Keynote & Sector Overview

Data-driven experience economy: The power of 3: digital transformation, cloud deployments and analytics for improving customer experience

Over the years, improving the customer experience has remained the top driver for digital transformation, making it critical to understand where businesses are making investments in new digital technologies and improved processes to more effectively engage customers, partners or employees across sales, marketing, support and commerce functions. Data and cloud remain a core battleground for creating unified customer experiences. Businesses need to not only capture and unify disparate sources of consumer data but effectively contextualize and operationalize information to push critical insights across channels and differing organizational stakeholder groups with a hand in shaping the customer journey.

Presenter: Sheryl Kingstone

Virtual Roundtable

In a world where disruption and digital experience has changed the face of customer experiences, businesses must elevate the importance of agile IT infrastructure, cybersecurity and data and analytics with an eye toward accelerating the pace of digital transformation. Businesses must embrace a modern approach to improving customer experiences from core to edge as innovation and resiliency are keys to survival.

Moderator: Sheryl Kingstone

Panelist: PagerDuty

Panel Discussion

The digital transformation of payments: Moving from commodity to commerce catalyst

The reach and impact of payments has broadened significantly in recent years. Payments today are a direct input into the customer experience, geographic expansion, omni-channel execution and overall business performance. As a result, developing an innovative payments strategy is fast becoming a key business priority. This session will explore the increasing strategic value of payments for enterprises, and discuss the role of cloud, data, and analytics in powering high-performing digital payments infrastructure.

Presenter: Jordan McKee

Panel Discussion

Looking into the Future: Delivering Better, Faster, More Valuable IT-driven Business Outcomes in the Digital Era

Technology fuels the platforms that give organizations the freedom to fail fast and the scale to succeed fast. During HCTS 2020 closing session, our key leaders will give their final remarks, insight for the future and actionable advice.

Moderator: Sheryl Kingstone

Panelists: Melanie Posey, Kelly Morgan, Fernando Montenegro, and Brett Azuma