Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations
Management Summit

Track C: Exploiting Clouds From Both Sides, Now and in the Future

Sessions

DevOps: The Cloud Operating Model

To achieve agility and economies of scale, many of the large cloud services providers have had to develop new ways of thinking about IT service delivery. DevOps is the term usually associated with what has become a cloud operating model or blueprint. This session discusses what DevOps is and how it may pave the way for “creative destruction,” with respect to traditional IT service management.

Is Your Network the Weak Link in Cloud Computing?

The hype surrounding cloud computing often overlooks the realities of connecting the enterprise to cloud-based services. In any cloud scenario, whether building a private cloud or taking advantage of public cloud services, enterprises need to think about the end-to-end delivery of traffic and how the network architecture needs to adapt to these new service focused architectures. This session examines the impact on the enterprise network when considering cloud architectures.

Bring the Storage Cloud to Your Data Center

Public cloud storage promises substantially improved agility, reduced storage costs and the freeing up of data center space. But integrating public cloud storage into your data center can be challenging and more expensive than cursory evaluations might indicate. This session explores the benefits and risks of deploying cloud storage, including market and technology trends impacting the evolution of cloud storage and current vendors and their offerings.

Choosing Colocation Services: Strategic, Tactical or Practical?

Despite the overwhelming hype around cloud services, colocation continues to be a more mature and tactical option for those that have near to midterm requirements for additional space and compute. The key in making your decision is to align your space, power and management requirements with the models available, including datacenter leasing and whole or retail colocation. Each has their own use cases as well as risks. In this session, you’ll create decision frameworks to evaluate the varying models and pricing metrics, and for managing the associated migration issues.

Building the Private Cloud

The majority of large enterprises are planning to build private clouds. Although technologies are immature and incomplete, dozens of vendors are hyping private cloud solutions. In the end, technology is the easiest part of building a private cloud. The hardest work involves these areas: culture, processes, customer relationships, services-orientation, and skills. This session discusses the roadmap to the private cloud, including the best and worst practices, technologies, and vendor strategies and offerings.

Stuck Between Stations: From Traditional Data Center to Private Cloud

Many enterprises have started down the path to building a private cloud, but the road is difficult to navigate. This deep-dive session focuses on the building blocks required to transform the traditional data center into one capable of delivering Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Low-level architecture configurations such as VM template, virtual hard disk architecture, management integration, and security best practices are examined. The session also describes the new Gartner ITP maturity model for building an internal cloud, followed by an open discussion on the technical and operational nuances associated with IaaS delivery.

External Cloud Provider - Selection Criteria

With major cloud providers like Amazon unwilling to share information about the infrastructure, selecting a cloud provider is something of a lottery. This session discusses a set of selection criteria for cloud providers that includes:

• Infrastructure
• Support
• Availability
• Billing

Armed with these selection criteria, IT organizations can evaluate different cloud offerings and determine the best fit to their needs.

Bringing Cloud to Earth for I&O: Practical Advice and Implementations

There is confusion in enterprise I&O as to the opportunities and reality of cloud computing. Why wouldn’t I&O want to increase efficiencies, drive costs down and enable business agility? But how and where should it be done? This session aims to bring cloud computing to earth by providing both practical advice and case studies that demonstrate the value propositions of private cloud and real-time infrastructure implementations.

Finding the Cheese: Navigating the Cloud infrastructure services maze

Enterprises have begun to accelerate adoption of public, private and hybrid cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). We've seen a broad range of use cases as well as successes and failures. This session looks at the use cases for IaaS, how to make the most of internal and external investments, and key vendors that may be partners in your cloud ventures.

Analyst-User Roundtables

Recovery in the Cloud

Recovery-in-the- cloud services that support managed backup, restoration, testing and operations failover can become one of the future bright spots in what is otherwise a largely dormant industry. One key reason is the "always-on" nature of the cloud, making both recovery and failover testing far more flexible and actionable than is currently the case with more traditional shared subscription services. However, this service segment is extremely nascent and unfortunately its potential benefits are currently shrouded by far more questions than concrete answers at this point.

Leading-Edge Virtualization and Private Cloud Computing

Review with your peers and Gartner analysts your experiences with developing large-scale leading-edge virtualized infrastructures, including private cloud computing architectures. We'll discuss best practices, problems to avoid, challenges, and examples from elsewhere in the industry.

Managing the Movement from Virtualization to the Cloud

The adoption of virtualization platforms necessitated changes in IT operational processes, tools and support structure. Will we need to re-visit these again as we move towards cloud computing? We'll discuss the ramifications focusing primarily on private cloud implementations.

Cloud Computing is just one part of the I&O picture. View all Analyst/User Roundtables.

Agenda Builder Tool

With a wealth of sessions, it is helpful to have a tool to build your own agenda focusing on your own needs. The online Agenda Builder helps you select and add them to your calendar, and to build in networking and reflection time into your schedule. You can follow one of the specific tracks, or sessions based on maturity of your projects, business or technology focused sessions or just simply mix and match!

Click here for the Agenda Builder tool.