Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2018 December 3 - 6 / Las Vegas, NV

How to get the most out of your conference experience.

The topic of containers has witnessed immense interest in enterprise IT over the past 12 months. In this session, I&O leaders will learn about the potential impact containers will have on their IT environment, the evolving vendor ecosystem and how they need to rethink current infrastructure and operations approaches to be successful.

This workshop illustrates through hands on activities how to use eight steps for planning negotiations with major vendors — megavendors, and new and emerging software and cloud vendors. These steps can and should be used for any major negotiation to ensure the right questions are asked and the right detail is revealed to analyze proposals from a cost optimization and risk-mitigation standpoint. They focus on engaging the right IT and business stakeholders to identify requirements and then using stakeholders as part of the negotiation plan and strategy to optimize these deals to optimize and balance cost, value and risk. Workshop attendees will receive ready-to-use checklists, templates, and matrices to execute these eight steps effectively in their organizations.

This workshop is a practical session on how to start or assess an existing continuous improvement program (CIP) to ensure production of consistent results and achieving a sufficient return on investment. Participants will leave with a better understanding and reliable methods for ensuring their CIP is scalable, repeatable and customizable, meeting the needs of your organization.

The pace at which digital skills change is rapid and accelerating. The existing model of training and development can't effectively meet the demand of digital business. CIOs and digital business leaders must renovate their professional development strategy to create a learning culture that keeps staff engaged and motivated to build an agile and digital-capable workforce.

I&O leaders must evolve strategies to provide an agile infrastructure for the business to enable global reach, solve business issues like latency, customer experience, and compliance, while providing the flexibility to enter new markets quickly, anywhere, anytime. This must embrace traditional compute, emerging trends in edge computing, IoT, AI/ML and the ever-changing cloud marketplace. I&O leaders itself must also evolve the skills, process and roles to support this brave new world.

In this session, we will explore the world of software-defined storage and how it is implemented in enterprise from hyperconverged to hyperscale spectrum of deployments. We will review the SDS market segmentation and explore vendors selection that addressing support for many use cases such as traditional applications, unstructured data, containers support and hybrid cloud integration enablement.

Digital business will drive a convergence of physical and digital, changing the shape of infrastructure and creating new business moments. Immersive, IoT Technology and augmented reality will push real-time decision-making and intelligence closer to the people and things at the edge. Cloud computing changed infrastructure and operations - edge computing is the next wave of change.

Public cloud services are growing at 19% CAGR through 2021. The cloud maturity model is driving business and IT leaders to make cloud as the underpinning of their cloud strategy and they are doing it with their wallets. Cloud spending is 20% of IT budgets as per to Gartner’s cloud adoption survey. Top four hyperscale cloud providers command 57% of the public cloud market according to Gartner's recent Market Share study. This session will discuss the cloud growth trajectory across different cloud segments. We will go beyond the numbers and help IT leaders explore which external factors, new technologies, best practices and winners and losers within the cloud landscape.

Talent and skills are the top internal constraints to digital business growth. CIOs must effectively transform the IT workforce to equip with the talent and skills needed to propel the digital enterprise. In this session, participants will learn about market trends and best practices in planning, acquiring and developing IT talent and skills in support of digital business.

As communication technologies change the needs of IoT solutions continue to evolve. Organizations must recognize the differing networking requirements for differing IoT devices deployed in numerous vertical markets. The right technology must be connected to the appropriate use cases in order to successfully deploy the entire IoT solution, otherwise it will fail. This presentation segments the market by analyzing different usage scenarios and identifying the key issues, questions and technology needed to properly implement IoT solutions.

Comparisons with a variety of public cloud options are changing the way that infrastructure managers must evaluate their own infrastructure choices. This session will examine what best practices can be used to optimize infrastructure ROI and create a favorable and complementary view of self-owned infrastructure and private cloud in the face of public-cloud alternatives.

Infrastructure and operations leaders must realize that there is no single automation tool that is capable of automating all I&O scenarios. Successful automation deployments are focused on specific domains and use cases with well-defined processes. To be successful in the future I&O leaders must have a strategic and proactive automation strategy.

Container software revolutionizes application delivery. Containers make you fitter. Containers make you happier. Containers make you coffee. There's a lot of claims made for containers, and mythology has built up around it. For example, Docker is just for Linux, or containers are less secure than VMs. This session will examine ten of these myths, confirming some and busting others, so that you can walk away with answers to questions such as "How do I overcome objections to using containers in your enterprise?" • How do I ensure gung-ho developers have done their due diligence on end-to-end governance for containers?

DevOps provides many perspectives on how to deliver value faster. While many organizations have initial teams in place, they are struggling with how to scale their efforts. Google developed Site Reliability Engineering in order to scale their services and there are many proven practices that DevOps teams can leverage. This presentation will focus on our top five recommendations.

Public cloud computing offers the potential for high levels of continuity but operational reliability cannot be taken for granted. Even the most reliable of cloud services requires some level of customer configuration and ongoing administration to enable the highest levels of processing redundancy and data protection. IaaS and SaaS are conceptually similar, but a successful cloud contingency effort must accommodate their unique differences.

This roundtable discusses challenges in modern WANs including price, performance and availability and touch on topics including SD-WAN and Hybrid WAN architectures. Attendees will be asked to share their approaches and concerns to WAN design.

This roundtable will address how experience management and design methods are used in driving organizational change in support of key business outcomes. We will highlight key items from Gartner research, address where and how often these techniques are used and what results have come from this. Come here to discover ideas for transforming your organization.

Digital twin technology is a hot topic within many organizations, yet determining what I&O capabilities are needed to support digital twins and enable successful exploration of its possibilities is difficult. Join other I&O leaders wrestling with digital twin initiatives to share the challenges you have faced, what you have learned, and hear from others on the opportunities and lessons learned from their experiences.

Digital platform business initiatives require time to value (TTV) in minutes, but 89% of I&O functions cannot meet these digital TTV requirements, threatening digital failure. We describe how the top 10% of I&O functions have applied a product-oriented I&O service delivery approach to power digital business success.

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing services, organizations are rapidly moving to shut down entire data centers. While most organizations won't end up 100% "in the cloud," the reality is that many workloads can be moved somewhere else. This session will walk attendees through Gartner's framework for assessing existing applications against cloud, hosting, and colocation solutions in order to determine the best execution venue(s).

Everyone knows that edge computing is the new greatest trick in their IT toolbox. But as with any new over-hyped technology, edge promises as much pain as it does relief from the problems brought about IoT, immersive reality and autonomous vehicles. This session will identify the challenges of successful deployment and will offer ideas on how to avoid these pitfalls.

CIOs increasingly deploy agile methodologies to create and deliver IT solutions in their organizations. While continuous delivery can create value for IT and organizations at large, it breaks information security’s traditional, "waterfall" approach to risk management. Learn to model successful CIOs who have rethought security governance and delivery for the digital era.

Name change: Top industry trends and how they will impact infrastructure and operations teams and the digital infrastructures they support,

I&O leaders deploying containers for critical use cases need operational tooling to manage application development life cycle. This includes evaluating the capabilities and use case fit of leading container management solutions. This session will present a framework for how enterprises can evaluate on-premises/hybrid container management systems.

De facto toolchains exist in the organization. Key steps will enable I&O leaders to improve their performance and optimize them for I&O objectives.

Enterprises are on a journey to digital business, and an expansion of their application portfolios. I&O leaders need to modernize for existing applications, while adding support for agile development, rapid and real-time scaling, and low-latency analytics. Infrastructures of the future will span enterprise data centers, cloud and the intelligent edge – enabled and managed by I&O.

The combination of HCIS, software defined storage, NVME and new application architectures are driving important changes in networking for storage. Containers and microservices often demand extremely low latency access while HCIS does away with the traditional shared SAN-attached array. That said, existing applications must be supported. This presentation provides explains how to introduce new technologies such ad NVME-over-Fabrics to support new initiatives like HCIS and SDS while incrementally improving existing infrastructure.

As the pace of technology innovation accelerates, infrastructure teams need to rebalance the skills portfolio. This presentation will feature our quantitative research on the five critical competencies for IT staff in contributing to digital business outcomes. We will include case studies from Nationwide and Intel and how they help employees develop emerging skills and versatile career paths.

Edge computing today is all about the art of the possible. Leading-edge adopters are deploying edge computing solutions to enable new business designs that enable IoT or immersive technologies. We discuss a wide variety of examples in deployment today, and lessons learned. We also discuss examples that we expect to see within the next year or two.

Most people think of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as compute and stored, but AWS is now a collection of more than 80 different services for cloud-based IaaS workloads and information. This session will discuss the specific best practices for securing workloads and information in IaaS with AWS-specific examples, covering compliance, encryption, key management, network security, monitoring and host-based controls.

Many organizations are evaluating the use of Blockchain technology. This will place new challenges on existing infrastructure and I&O leaders must evolve their capabilities to ensure they can effectively handle this new workload – whether in the cloud or on-premises. We will advise what technologies must be considered to ensure a successful Blockchain deployment with minimal impact on existing infrastructure. • How does Blockchain impact traditional infrastructure? • What technology should be implemented to enable blockchain developments? • Which technology vendors are best aligned to meet I&O leaders needs?

IT culture is a huge barrier to scaling enterprise digital initiatives. Culture change is often viewed as a laborious and time-consuming notion, led via top-down strategies and often leads to "transformation fatigue." Instead, we recommend approaching culture change like a hacker, exploiting points where the culture is vulnerable to change. Once done, you can cement the change by turning the hack into habit.

This session looks at the new Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities for Hyper Converged Infrastructure and the five workloads of consolidated, business critical, cloud ROBO and VDI use cases.

I&O is stuck in a "going out of business" model stemming from budget practices with IT was merely considered a cost center for back office support. This has resulted in technical debt and a lack of investment for the future. Many look to cloud for the answers but fail to determine the value-added role of the IT organization, underestimate its complexity, and overlook the investment required to be successful as one scales.

So many of the initiatives I&O leaders are working on inevitably require a cultural shift for success — unfortunately culture is the most frequently mentioned obstacle to change. It is considered hard to understand and even harder to change. This session will allow attendees to discuss the topics for starting conversations about culture that can be effective starting points for exploring and changing your organizational and team cultures.

The growing popularity of both public cloud services and container-related technology requires I&O leaders to understand the technology choices that are available in the market. Most of the major public cloud service providers offer container services with varying capabilities and underlying technology. This session will allow attendees to ask specific questions about how enterprises can evaluate public cloud container services.

Sometimes in our professional lives we might think we are in a battle to beat an adversary or a competitor when in actuality we are really in competition with ourselves but just haven’t figured it out yet. When battling the competition, you want to come out on top, if only by one more sale or maybe a few percentage points. Other times, someone at a higher level gives you a goal based on some median expectation set for others. When Mike Abrashoff took command of a well below-average ship in the U.S. Navy, his goal was to get to average. He initially set average goals and expectations for himself and his crew until one day it dawned on him: his ship could be much better than just average. It was Mike’s eureka moment: realizing they weren’t in competition with anyone but themselves. To be their best they had to stop putting limits on what they believed was possible. That realization changed Mike Abrashoff’s approach to leadership and led the same crew to accomplish one of the most remarkable turnarounds that was chronicled in the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company magazine and his New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal bestselling book, IT’S YOUR SHIP. This presentation will challenge audiences to think differently on how to set expectations while realizing the only limits that you have are self-imposed.

a. What workloads are most commonly being moved to the cloud? b. What are the top challenges faced when working in the cloud? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. What I&O practices are most in need maturation? b. What are others doing to improve I&O maturity? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How are you addressing skill and training requirements? b. How are others finding talent to support digital business? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

This roundtable will discuss how organizations are evolving their existing hyperconverged infrastructure to reach the next level of maturity. Attendees will share their experiences with expanding hyperconverged use to new workloads, organizational and process changes they've adopted, and their learnings about managing hyperconverged infrastructure life cycles.

Software asset management tools have become popular; however, their diverse data requirements make the selection process challenging. By ensuring their SAM tool delivers four primary capabilities, infrastructure and operations leaders will choose the right SAM tool to support their enterprise goals.

CASB is now being deployed by organizations large and small. What are the features, the successful use cases, and the requirements needed to make your CASB deployment a successful one? Preregistration is required. Seats are limited.

This session takes a look at the latest Magic Quadrant covering hyperscale public cloud providers, understanding significant changes and trends in the market space.

I&O leaders have traditionally rewarded team members with depth of technical expertise. Embracing DevOps and enabling a digital business future will dramatically shift the types of skills needed in I&O. Learn how to embrace new methods of attracting, developing and motivating staff necessary to transform I&O's portfolio of skills.

Organizations using public cloud services often wonder if public cloud services will be less expensive than hosting applications in their data center. Many exceed cloud budget expectations and struggle to establish financial management procedures to continuously monitor cloud spending. Join this session to learn how to evaluate public cloud costs and implement best practices to avoid overspending.

Successful AI initiatives require the adoption of new technologies, processes and governance models. In this session, we will discuss proven use cases, key challenges and solid best practices to devise effective AI strategies.

This session will explore the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) and the disruption it will cause for Infrastructure and Operations teams, as they must adapt their infrastructure, processes, skills and tooling.

Microsoft has fundamentally altered the Windows release cadence with Windows 10, causing a significant strain on IT organizations. How should your company deal with large, twice-per-year Windows 10 upgrades? Attendees will discuss issues with update frequency, deployment approaches and staffing concerns created by this new update model.

IoT Technology is generating the most rapid evolution and disruption the industry has seen in many years. IoT is fostering advances in artificial intelligence, analytics, security, communications and endpoints which enable new and game-changing opportunities. At the same time, these advances introduce complexity and integration challenges never before seen. CIOs must understand when, where and how they can capitalize on the IoT and the key technology advances it brings, while preparing for the inevitable challenges.

Business leaders of midsize companies are experiencing a high level of confidence which MSE IT leaders can leverage for investment in key projects. In this session, we will discuss the major trends shaping Midsize Enterprises. 1 Adoption of Cloud inspired hybrid infrastructure 2Cloud adoption: Opportunistic use of anything as a service 3 Enhanced security detection and response capabilities 4 Embrace platforms that optimize operations and customer experience 5. Exploitation of data and analytics to drive agility and strategy

Many talk about it, but few have an operating continuous improvement program that produces tangible results and a sufficient return on investment. At the end of this session, you'll better understand the elements of a continuous improvement program that is scalable, repeatable and how it can be customized to the needs of your organization.

We talk a lot about building a hybrid cloud, but how do you actually do it? On the agenda for the talk: How "hybrid" is hybrid? Four varying levels of what could be called a hybrid cloud, from completely separate infrastructures with a CMP riding on top to compute mobility between on-premises and public: - Comparing various commercial options on this spectrum - Maturity model for cloud - IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS

AIOps is a term that is getting a lot of attention, but what does this mean for network operations. This session will discuss how AIOps techniques and tools and being used for your network operator use cases.

Linux (and Windows) OS containers are not inherently unsecure, but are being deployed unsecurely, driven by developers and a need for agility in service development and deployment. Security and risk management leaders must address container security issues around vulnerabilities, visibility, compromise, compliance and orchesration. This session will provide specific best practices for secure container deployments.

DevOps can greatly enhance a business but many organizations struggle to get started, and then find it difficult to balance speed and risk. Changes are required in culture, process, technology and skills. This session helps you determine the right goals, skills, responsibilities, technologies and priorities to ensure your DevOps initiative delivers business value, while managing costs and risks.

SMEs should tailor their network architecture and procurement to meet their needs, which are often very different that those of larger organizations. This session provides guidance on how SMEs can maximize the benefits from their investment in networking.

DC I&O leaders must begin to shift thinking when evaluating integrated systems. The traditional way of structuring DC systems makes the builds a static, prescriptive process of repeated upgrades based on predicted capacity and performance requirements by time periods. However, cloud is driving infrastructure modernization in which the DC is a resource pool responsive to the needs of developers, dynamic in provisioning, increasingly delivering services at a just-in-time pace at costs on per resource usage basis. Thus, I&O leaders will be expected to respond to business units and digital consumer needs for enterprise viability. This is a one-way avenue, not returning to legacy and traditional modes of operation.

Cloud is no longer an "if" but "how" for most organizations. Many recognize they need to adopt cloud services to remain competitive, drive innovation and create agility across their business. Join this session to learn how to build a "cloud-first" strategy for your business and begin establishing hybrid cloud architectures to consume cloud services at scale.

A discussion of several critical emerging architectural decisions in the hyperconverged and software-defined data center markets, plus an in-depth, head-to-head comparison of the leading hyperconverged vendors.

Join midsize enterprise IT leaders for this session. Frequently asked questions to be addressed include: • What's the best way to start developing this strategy? • How can an agile decision-making framework be designed to visually compare and contrast current infrastructure and application workloads against a dynamic vendor landscape filled with cloud-based solutions of varying maturity? • How can the cloud strategy be communicated to business leaders looking to take advantage of cloud services' perceived benefits (such as decreased capital expenditures, shorter deployment cycles and agility)?

Knowing that dev. teams are turning to agile methodology is a key signal for automation adoption in operations. This talk will review the top 3 areas for consideration by I&O leaders.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a wide ranging term and recent developments have moved it into the mainstream and security software. However, without a background it's difficult for customers to evaluate its use in products and what benefits it provides over more conventional technologies. This session shows security leaders how to evaluate claims and determine the concrete benefits of using AI.

A high quality IT service catalog has a significant positive impact on the customer's perceptions of IT. Learn the successful principles and practices to create and continually optimize your IT service catalog.

Disaster recovery services have evolved over the last few years. There are many new and different types of DRaaS providers, several different enabling technologies, and more target location options due to the proliferation of cloud and colocation. This session explores those options, what things to consider when deciding between DRaaS and DIY, and common pitfalls to avoid.

Suddenly the WAN is cool again. SDWAN, multicloud, direct internet access and new applications are driving profound changes at the edge of the corporate WAN. This session will cover the findings of Gartner's intial WAN Edge Magic Quadrant.

Hyperscale cloud providers' have extended their runtime environments for development and use on edge devices, such as IoT "things". Signs point to public cloud technology on-premises! This session will detail the distinctions between cloud, core and edge, and the different approaches of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google will be addressed in detail.

What do you mean you weren't entirely GDPR compliant on May 25th, 2018? Your IaaS cloud providers cannot make you GDPR compliant. But they need to meet data protection standards and at least, not hinder your compliance efforts. Focusing on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, this session assesses cloud providers' services and their behavior against your GDPR obligations. What practices do they demonstrate for network and information security, and data protection? What contractual commitments do they offer that address the GDPR? What user controls do hyperscale CSPs offer in their services — such as geofencing, encryption and access control — that can be used to either address the GDPR requirements more effectively and efficiently, or significantly alleviate the burden of them?

Learn which hyperconverged infrastructure suppliers are best positioned to meet the current and future needs of your organization. Understand when and why you should include vendors that are not currently leaders. Assess when it's better to select an OEM or integration partner of a leading vendor, rather than the vendor itself.

The session will present the results of 2018 Hype Cycle for Compute Infrastructure. Gartner will discuss the maturity, adoption, and relevance of many compute technologies including containers, hyperconverged infrastructure, serverless and quantum computing.

This presentation will analyze how global data residency concerns and legislation will affect your data center and cloud regional strategy. It will further examine the impacts of data protection and IOT on global application placement. Attendees will be able to understand the approaches to compliant data placement in the view of various data protection regulations such as GDPR.

IT infrastructure and operations groups have traditionally organized around technology or functional silos. Learn how enterprises are organizing to successfully cope with the much more dynamic requirements inherent with digital business and support for DevOps.

The software-defined, virtualization, hyperconvergence, edge computing and IoT initiatives are pressures on IT organizations and their budgets. Architecturally, they all need planning and integrating with projects across the portfolio. This session looks at how I&O leaders should define the Internet of Edge infrastructure and operations as an extension to Core IT, allowing IT and the business to integrate better and extend onto new business models and modes of operation. Key issues: - How do you discover and define Core IT and the Internet of Edge? - How do you rationalize and reduce complexity while adding more complex IoE? - How do you and consolidate and manage on-premises cloud and hosting of Core IT and IoE?

This session will provide an update on the current state of container technology. This will include an analysis of the technology, the vendors that make up the ecosystem and the associated products. Additionally, the issues that enterprises are facing will be discussed. Finally, the session will also discuss how the technology and the industry will evolve over the 3-5 years.

The goal of this presentation is to educate I&O leaders about artificial intelligence and machine learning workload requirements and impact on storage. In this presentation we outline the various phases of AI/ML workloads (ingest, training, inference and archive), and map them to the appropriate storage requirements. We will also help I&O leaders to create the right vendor /product selection criteria and showcase common architectures and approaches.

Enterprise IT strategies continue to depend more on cloud and the vendors delivering cloud based solutions. We describe how cloud computing offerings exist on a spectrum and look at cloud strategies of the megavendors (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, et al) and how CIOs and IT leaders can assess the applicability of those vendors' offerings to the organizations' cloud strategy.

Is there a fit for RPA in I&O? What about AI in I&O automation? When should I look to robots and AI to help solve my I&O automation problems. Bring your AI/RPA questions to this Ask an Analyst session and learn what Gartner is recommending to our clients.

Network infrastructure must be both agile and available to truly scale digital initiatives. This session describes the people, process and technology changes required to enterprise networks over the next several years. In this session, we will cover what external and macro level factors will impact enterprise networks, how will new technologies impact enterprise networks and what best practices should clients employ within their networks.

a. How are others mixing cloud and hybrid compute models? b. What workloads are we moving to the cloud and why? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How are others driving and developing a DevOps culture? b. What are the blocking issues we should watch out for and avoid? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How do other link business and IT strategy? b. What are the most successful tactics for others? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

The question of "which applications should be in the cloud?" is an important one. It must be posed as part of an iterative, holistic cloud strategy, not a never-ending series of tactical decisions. You must own the strategy building elements and operate with the goal of digital transformation in mind. This session will provide actionable advice on creating a comprehensive, enterprise cloud based applications strategy, while offering guidance as to the what, where and when for enterprise workloads.

I&O leaders intending to start and scale cloud journeys, face a whole new level of complexity and challenge. Join this session to discuss the rapidly evolving market of managed service providers for public cloud to enable you to further explore this market.

This roundtable discussion explores best practices and lessons learned from enterprise (not vendor) attendees on how to successfully build a DevOps culture and navigate the inevitable hurdles that arise.

Serverless computing is an emerging software architecture pattern that promises to eliminate the need for infrastructure provisioning and management. This session will allow discussion into what serverless computing is, its pros/cons and what the role of I&O should be in enabling this computing abstraction.

Join us for this lightly moderated session to discuss best practices for deploying virtual desktops, DaaS and other remote application technologies with your midsize enterprise peers.

IT leaders and IT professionals devote a lot of time to their job and not enough to take a long-term view of their career. The complexity in managing our work and personal life impedes our ability to find time to devote to ourselves and identifying and working toward what we want out of a career. One that successfully meets your work-life balance needs. In this session, learn practical approaches to building a satisfying and rich career.

Inaccurate data in CMDBs delays incident resolution and degrades change quality. I&O leaders must address data ownership, data model scope, systems of record and IT change management gaps to sustainably improve CMDB data quality.

Automation is the watchword of modern, agile IT. And it often begins by automating server and application delivery. This talk offers in-depth, concrete guidance on (1) automating server provisioning and configuration management, and (2) building a continuous delivery pipeline. It takes a close look at the tools you'll use, and the challenges you’ll face, on the road to DevOps.

Effective patch management mitigates risk by eliminating domain-specific activities and applying standard processes across all enterprise systems. Discuss your patch management strategies, challenges and practices with other organizations.

Welcoming new storage technologies into data centers must be carefully navigated to transform your infrastructure. Organizations will gain insight into the timelines of maturity for next-generation memory and NVMe technology and determine which application workloads would benefit. AI-driven management will play an integral role for I&O leaders to unlock technology innovation and to pursue the autonomous data center.

Enterprises are on a journey to digital business, and an expansion of their application portfolios. I&O leaders need to modernize for existing applications while adding support for agile development, rapid and real-time scaling, and low-latency analytics. Infrastructures of the future will span enterprise data centers, cloud and the edge — enabled and managed by I&O.

The next-generation hybrid data center will not be the center of your data. In fact, we can't call it a data center anymore as data will be distributed in the cloud, managed hosted and or multiple colocation facilities. However, the data center is not dead — far from it. I&O professionals must increase their agility by taking automation and orchestration initiatives to the next level while the organizations shifts from a capex to opex model. This session will address what I&O professionals need to know when designing a state of the art hybrid data center. In this session, you'll learn: • How to design a hybrid data center leveraging the latest technologies. • How to evaluate and select providers, deploy applications, mitigate risks through new disaster recovery techniques and manage hybrid cloud services. • What your job will look like in the future with this new model and what to do about it now.

As more business processes becoming digitized, in other words they go from analogue fax, phone, paper, to fully digital, I&O leaders have an opportunity to exploit the vast amounts of data flowing through their IT systems to extract business insight. We will explore how I&O leaders have added value beyond technical insight to their organizations by helping them understand the business context.

This session will allow participants to ask questions and to share experiences and success stories they have encountered as they advance along the path toward cloud and/or edge computing and IT.

As a result of accelerating change, a new breed of businesses is scaling 10 times faster than established organizational structures. Salim Ismail calls these exponential organizations. This talk describes the characteristics and attributed of these organizations and finishes with how to implement these ideas into established companies. He looks at today’s fastest growing technologies and the social impact they will have on our organizational, political, legal, educational, and medical systems. From artificial intelligence to biotech, these disruptive technologies are changing the face of many disparate industries and creating new innovations and opportunities. Audiences walk away with a tailored action plan for moving forward that utilizes five internal and five external strategies to spur astounding growth – like partnering with an incubator and transforming their organization’s leadership team.

a. How do we map I&O to business outcomes? b. What are others doing to demonstrate business impact? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. What skills are most needed? b. Where are others looking to find new talent?Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How are other making the case for a more strategic approach to DR? b. How do I get me executive team’s attention? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

Cloud computing use has become commonplace for many enterprises. What role can I&O play in such deployments? What considerations and steps can you take to support these initiatives? If your enterprise has or will be embarking on a cloud computing deployment, join us for this group discussion focused session.

This Roundtable will allow attendees to share experiences and strategies for security cloud-based services including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services.

This peer interaction session will focus on the challenges of optimizing IT operations and how we can do more with what we have, reduce where needed and make better investments in business outcomes. Please come prepared to share both your challenges and success in optimizing I&O operations in an open round table discussion with your peers.

This session will facilitate the discussion of the ITSM tool market and provide guidance on how to select the right set of tools for the client's organization.

Learn how Magic Quadrants for storage are created, what they measure, and their relationship to Critical Capabilities research. Learn how to use Magic Quadrants to improve staff productivity and reduce the risks associated with infrastructure refreshes, and use them and their companion critical capabilities notes to provide negotiation leverage.

DevOps has rapidly moved from a niche to a mainstream approach, but most I&O groups haven't addressed the fundamental people, cultural and skill changes required. Learn the key methods to build a solid foundation for DevOps to scale to be the primary I&O mindset.

Traditional security approaches won't work well with DevOps-style workflows, yet organizations are tasked with the security and compliance of the applications and services that are delivered from these rapid development processes. This presentation will outline specific best practices to integrate security into DevOps, delivering DevSecOps, without breaking the collaborative nature of DevOps.

Software-defined data center platforms power the hybrid cloud. They can provide a unified, API-driven control plane for both public cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Now, they're being extended to the edge to manage the Internet of Things. Here's a technical deep-dive into SDDC architectures, with a comparison of commercial SDDC platforms from VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat and Nutanix.

Many organizations continue to invest significant sums in their IBM mainframe environment. Yet issues such as software pricing and skills availability continue to be raised as reasons why for some, further investment needs to be curtailed and migration options need to be explored. This session provides insight into the role the mainframe will play within an organizational's portfolio of IT assets, and what tactics and strategies users can employ to get the maximum return on their mainframe investment.

Ever wonder if you've made mistakes with your Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure environment? You might be surprised. With so many moving parts, AWS and Azure IaaS is ripe for catastrophic misconfiguration. Even worse are the architectures doomed for failure before they're ever turned on. Don't be that architect. Join Elias on this exploration of the biggest mistakes he's seen in the field across scores of AWS and Azure IaaS inquiries.

Cloud-based Dev/Ops/Test, AI/DL, and IoT are demanding a rethink of infrastructure design and operation that places a greater emphasis on autonomic operation, ecosystem support, cloud, integration, vendor postsales support capabilities, cost, and asset management while reducing the importance of more traditional measures of product attractiveness such as performance, availability and scale. In this presentation, we explore new storage technologies and vendor sales models through the following key issues: • What are the pain points that are driving infrastructure change? • What are consumption and subscription lease/rental programs and how do they deliver maximum value? • How should alternate infrastructure strategies be developed and exploited?

The versatilist role profile is replacing specialists and generalists, and is an I&O leadership imperative for success with new product-oriented I&O operating models (digital business, platforms, cloud, DevOps, etc.) Learn how I&O roles are evolving for digital business with a review of the top 10 emerging versatilist roles.

a. What 3 things are others doing to do more with what they already have? b. Where else should we look to cut costs? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How are you addressing skill and training requirements? b. How are others finding talent to support digital business? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. Top 5 operational security issues we are facing? b. Improving the operations and security working relationship? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

There is increasing pressure and pace to get to the digital future while also overseeing and ensuring the current business is being successfully managed. The challenges include the need for cultural change, filling the skills gaps and finding the right people to do the work needed for now and into the future. In this 30 minute lunch presentation with the founder of Nextmapping and Future of Work Expert Cheryl Cran you will learn: • The skills solution - skills needed now and into the future to maximize ‘legacy’ and innovation • The mindset agility needed to think with both a ‘legacy’ mindset while creating systems and solutions for the digital future • The people solution - how to leverage the unseen skills of your talent pool and identify the opportunities to improve the gap in talent • Action items and follow that can be taken back to the business for immediate implementation and success

This session showcases the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service. DRaaS emerged to address the need of IT organizations — which did not have the required staffing and/or secondary center facility — to support increasingly aggressive recovery-time targets. Learn how to leverage the DRaaS MQ when choosing among the 500+ providers in the marketplace and avoid underserving or overcharging the business.

Distribute Digital Infrastructures are fundamentally changing the data centers, but several new technologies are also impacting the on-premises Data Center infrastructure options. In this session, we will cover the key technologies presented in our latest Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure 2018.

While most enterprises are actively engaged with using cloud-based resources in 2018, connecting the enterprise to the cloud often lags behind in terms of sophistication, security and architecture. There are several approaches far superior than simple internet or VPN access. Attendees of this session can pose questions as to best practices in integrating cloud services with their existing infrastructure.

Join a small group of midsize enterprise IT leaders for this highly interactive Q&A session. Frequently asked questions include: • What are the main technology trends impacting midsize enterprises digital business model? • Which technologies can improve business outcomes for midsize enterprises? • How can midsize enterprise IT leaders leverage specific technologies to address self-identified challenges and priorities?

This roundtable discussion explores best practices and lessons learned from enterprise (not vendor) attendees on how to successfully organize I&O for cloud, while navigating the inevitable hurdles that arise.

Sharing use case experiences from 3-tier infrastructure displacement to IT at the edge to IT in the cloud. Who is doing what and why? Future plans.

As DevOps and Mode 2 practices expand in an organization, how must other departments, outside development and operations, also change their practices?

Applying the insights from Maverick Research, "Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will result in Fewer, but Bigger, Disasters," learn how to establish boundaries between AI/ML controlled systems to contain risks, maintain systems of human control as fail safes, and reduce the dependency on non-human-replicable systems/processes providing existential support.

Edge deployments are projected to grow, and the greatest risk to edge infrastructure is that it is often unattended. This presentation will examine the features and functions of micro modular data centers and how and why you should use them to support your edge infrastructure. An overview of the provider types and how to make the right provider selection will also be covered.

As organizations move toward a digital business model, CIOs and IT leaders must be equipped to adopt cloud-based services, replacing traditional on-premises infrastructure. They need to understand and communicate both the risks and rewards of a hybrid infrastructure as well as optimize costs as they adopt these services that are needed to achieve hybrid cloud benefits including agility, innovation, speed and savings. This presentation will discuss: • What are the benefits derived from hybrid infrastructure and services? • Wh at are the risks to be managed? • What processes should you adopt to support the desired benefits? How do you optimize costs?

The new reality for IT is a multicloud world, with applications and data hosted in an interconnected mesh of public cloud services, private clouds and data centers. This session guides enterprise and cloud architects on the key changes they must embrace to cope with this environment.

Reviewing the latest Magic Quadrant for distributed file systems and Object Storage.

Whether in the cloud or a local data center, the infrastructure requirements for AI-enabled applications will challenge existing resources and will require careful deployment planning to achieve success and maximize potential benefits. This session will advise what steps I&O leaders must take to prepare their infrastructure to meet the demands of these AI-enabled applications. • Making the cloud vs. local DC deployment decision • What technology should be implemented to support AI applications development and deployment • Which vendors are best aligned to support your AI deployments

Using IaaS and PaaS services from multiple cloud providers appeals to technical professionals that are looking to mitigate risk, reduce lock-in, increase flexibility and capitalize on the strengths and innovation of the cloud providers. However, multicloud is complex. In this session, we will discuss multicloud strategy and identify the different multicloud architectures. We will explore high value use cases and we will answer the million-dollar question: Which cloud should I you migrate your applications to and based on what criteria?

The top question in cloud computing is "How do we build a comprehensive cloud strategy?" CIOs and vendor management leaders struggle with prioritization and creating a strategy to ensure cloud success. This session takes a "cookbook approach" to: •Building a cloud strategy, one service at a time •How to structure a cloud strategy •Principles that will guide you to that goal

Join to learn what future IT operations management teams need to prepare for, where most are at today, and how to get future-ready.

CIOs have traditionally seen the data network as a functional entity and cost center. Today the network has transformed from functional to strategic alignment, and now the core of successful digital transformation, and supporting global business initiatives — which are driven by technology. I&O Leaders much now rethink the role of the network or risk failing to support short and long-term strategic organizational goals.

Serverless frameworks for function platform as a service (fPaaS) enable custom application logic to be packaged as functions that are delivered as event-triggered services. This session will review approaches to automate routine infrastructure & operation tasks in cloud-native environments using fPaaS processes on serverless platforms.

Our research shows that creating more inclusive teams is a proven strategy to improving employee engagement and productivity. This presentation will highlight case studies from adidas and Red Hat with practices to increase diversity in recruiting and foster more inclusive group norms in teams. This research will highlight quantitative analysis and best practices from hCEB tech and HR practices.

This session illustrates Gartner’s four-step methodology that is based on a cross-team approach to identify infrastructure cost savings opportunities. The methodology includes steps for the opportunities to be identified, analyzed, validated and approved for executing the plan to measure and report I&O cost savings, cost reduction, and cost avoidance.

IoT devices from vertical market lines of business and building automation have started to invade enterprise infrastructures. I&O leaders must separate and monitor all IoT solutions from the rest of the network to avoid being hacked or causing havoc on the enterprise infrastructure. This presentation analyzes the issue and provides strategic options that enterprises can leverage to address the influx of IoT devices.

Core IT has to scale, up, out down and in.... it has to expand and integrate with an intelligent Edge and the explosion of IoT. This session looks at the challenges that still remain for a Digital Infrastructure where Core-IT and Edge creates a them and us scenario. Multi mode IT allows you to develop and optimize the core while expanding on all fronts and multiple mode fronts, Edges and things. The following key issues will be discussed: • What are the business drivers the Core IT Digital Infrastructure Cycle? • How do you optimize Core IT and Edge/IoT infrastructure • How do you define legacy and modernise or standardize projects??

Hyperconverged Integrated systems (HCIS) have moved from hardware to Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Software. This session looks at the HCI next steps, with regards to the ability to auto-tune infrastructure to the application and workload requirements. This composition change allows portability and HA/DR infrastructure to allocate multidomain multivendor resources between projects, on-premise, off-premise and in the cloud. 1) What HCI technology horizons exist to allow flexible resource compostion? 2) How does the digital business map the requirements to define infrastructure composition? 3) What is the best way to share resources and allow optimized integration and managment?

Containers can help enterprises modernize legacy applications and create cloud native applications that are scalable and agile. However, the container ecosystem today is immature. This session will help I&O leaders mitigate the challenges of deploying containers in production environments.

Midsize Enterprises are undergoing a phase of rapid growth, investment and productivity. Business leaders of midsize companies are experiencing a high level of confidence which IT leaders can leverage for investment in key projects to continue driving company growth. In this session, attendees will gain an understanding of the major trends shaping midsize environments. This session will unveil the myths of the midmarket, then dive deeply into the five trends including Hybrid Infrastructure, benefits of cloud computing, Security, enablement of the digital workplace, and how analytics are improving business and IT operations.

Once you have successfully moved your organization to Office 365 or G Suite, you might think there is little left to do; the benefits will just come pouring in. If you are lucky, some will. Everyone else will need to make sure the benefits by figuring out how to manage their deployment effectively, how to take advantage of the new capabilities to drive new ways of working, and how to make decisions about when not to use cloud office but consider an alternative. In short "What comes next?"

a. What are the best SDx entry points b. What are the things to watch out for? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How are others driving and developing a DevOps culture? b. What are the blocking issues we should watch out for and avoid? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. What colocation options are working best for others? b. How do we get more from our Co-lo relationships? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

In this user-driven roundtable, discuss how you chose the tools for your DevOps toolchains. What worked? What didn't? What lessons did you learn?

Amazon, Microsoft and Google — these megaproviders are vying to be your strategic cloud IaaS service for the future. How are you to choose? In this session, Gartner will present findings for each against 234 evaluation criteria points to help you make your strategic decision. Key issues: • How do I build a methodical evaluation strategy that will lead me to the correct strategic provider for our organization? • How do the mega-IaaS providers compare on Gartner's objective evaluation? • What does the future hold for these providers? What about IBM, VMware, Oracle and Alibaba Cloud?

Digital workplace solutions, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite, are delivered as a service. Leaders of IT operations must change their management and support models to deliver this type of service effectively.

Kubernetes is becoming established as the most popular platform for managing clusters of container hosts and technical professionals have a variety of options for deploying Kubernetes. This session will review the steps to integrate a self-managed Kubernetes platform with existing infrastructure for production use.

CIOs are asking I&O leaders to support exploratory but high-visibility blockchain projects, while I&O is bypassed entirely by some business units in their rush to "do blockchain." This session will demystify blockchain by describing how to set up your first project, who must be involved, and what internal & external resources it will require. 3 Key Issues: 1. Where does blockchain fit in the enterprise? 2. Who is involved in blockchain projects, and what is I&O's role? 3. What I&O resources does a blockchain project require?

At this stage of development, the full potential of software defined storage is yet to be realized. Expect SDS to gain new traction as a virtual offering in the public cloud; as a backup target to support IT at the edge; to support secondary storage; and, to support micro services underpinned by containers.

The most overlooked source of transformational power is experience management and design, as it addresses both internal and external needs. By starting with business-visible outcomes and satisfaction, I&O leaders will be better able to drive changes which deliver results, decrease risk, cost and complexity. This session will provide an overview of the basics and suggestions on getting started.

A service portfolio and service catalog are the cornerstones for any successful ITSM transformation. Technical professionals must use the service portfolio to articulate the value of IT to the business, and use the service catalog to set expectations for service delivery. This session will highlight some examples for companies that have done it right and those that have done it wrong. There will be liberal use of graphics and examples.

Although many focus on the underlying technology of the digital revolution, some fail to focus on people and culture. Business leaders and cyber professionals speak different languages and review different metrics when measuring progress and success. Frequently, these two groups do not understand one another and talk past one another, putting at risk growth, speed, agility and resilience within the enterprise. Deborah Lee James, the 23rd Secretary of the Air Force and current independent director on multiple public and private boards, shares the business factors that drive the cyber conversation at the Board of Director and senior government level. She’ll offer perspectives on what IT leaders need to know to communicate more effectively, become better business partners for growth and mission accomplishment, and change culture for the good.

At the close of the week this session is designed to allow attendees to ask, in an open forum, questions that have arisen throughout the week, or to seek clarification on any relevant topic from a panel of analysts.

At the close of the week this session is designed to allow attendees to ask, in an open forum, questions that have arisen throughout the week, or to seek clarification on any relevant topic from a panel of analysts.

At the close of the week this session is designed to allow attendees to ask, in an open forum, questions that have arisen throughout the week, or to seek clarification on any relevant topic from a panel of analysts.

At the close of the week this session is designed to allow attendees to ask, in an open forum, questions that have arisen throughout the week, or to seek clarification on any relevant topic from a panel of analysts.

At the close of the week this session is designed to allow attendees to ask, in an open forum, questions that have arisen throughout the week, or to seek clarification on any relevant topic from a panel of analysts.

a. How do I tell a business value story? b. What metrics should I use? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. Top challenges to defining business valued services and how to overcome them. b. How is service management different from what I am doing today? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

a. How are you addressing skill and training requirements? b. How are others finding talent to support digital business? Meetups are peer-to-peer exchanges for end-user attendees to build relationships, gain new perspectives and problem-solve with a small group of peers. You are encouraged to join Meetups to seek peer advice and importantly, to share your knowledge. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

Hype about AI continues to grow as consumers become familiar with virtual assistants outside the office. I&O leaders are keen to exploit this to optimize the IT service desk, but neither the technology nor the workplace culture are ready to depend on virtual agents in 2018. When will this happen, and how should I&O leaders prepare now?

Gartner surveys show formulating cloud strategy is one of the biggest challenges I&O leaders face. Join this roundtable to discuss how to author an impactful cloud strategy. Tackle the big challenges, make your strategy resonate with stakeholders, share your concerns and successes. Gain insight from your peers and your moderator, a Gartner analyst.

This roundtable is designed for organizations that have completed or are contemplating a migration to Microsoft Office 365 or Google G Suite to discuss best practices and lessons learned. Come with your questions, experiences and war stories! It will be moderated by Jeffrey Mann, agenda manager for the digital workplace applications key initiative.

This session will provide guidelines for network and system administrators selecting an optimal container host environment and review how container deployment affects systems administration. Topics covered will include a comparison of operating systems for use with Docker containers, factors determining whether to host containers on bare metal or in VMs and processes for managing container infrastructure lifecycles.

I&O leaders today are working aggressively in two specific ways: Provisioning infrastructure for business unit stakeholders and ingesting AI techniques to improve I&O efficiencies. Across several hundreds of Gartner inquiries and engagements, Gartner has identified I&O best practices that characterize highly successful and productive AI I&O ecosystems.

IT leaders often struggle to negotiate effective deals with the major software vendors — particularly the megavendors: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This presentation offers tips and tactics to help you optimize your negotiations and increase your bargaining power with these megavendors using a four-step "tailored" approach called T4. (1) T1 — What tactics and tricks to use for bargaining power; (2) T2 — What templates should be used to ask the right questions for cost transparency; (3) T3 — What Terms and Conditions should be negotiated to reduce risk and protect your investments; (4) T4 — How can timing be used to negotiate the optimally priced deal with protective Ts&Cs.

Today's network operations teams will require a significant skills shift to take advantage of advances in network automation and analytics and to meet the demands of digital business needs. I&O leaders must champion a paradigm shift to NetOps 2.0 to stay relevant.

The migration of data to the cloud is now being joined by the migration of data to the edge which is being driven by the emergence of IoT and sensors. Enterprises need to keep moving centrally consumed data and applications to the cloud but at the same time need to address the need to consume locally relevant data right where it is generated. Enterprises involved in a digital transformation strategy need to learn to adopt a new level of data consumption dexterity.

Moving IT services to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud providers profoundly affects the roles and responsibilities of IT professionals. The data center is no longer the center of your data. Hybrid cloud architectures are the new reality. This session provides guidance for IT infrastructure professionals (ITIPs) and managers on how to think about their roles, hone new skills and build a strategy for staying relevant in a hybrid world. In the session you will learn: - What is a cloud architect? - Which skills are necessary and how do you gain experience? - How do you pick the right survival strategy?

The pace of innovation in cloud computing has brought significant changes to data processing, but these changes have also highlighted the challenges that established organizational structures face in attempting to keep up. This is especially true in the realm of IT governance. This session will focus on evolving organizations toward more adaptive governance strategies, aiming to make organizations more nimble while also managing risk and investment prioritization decisions.

The emergence of public IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and serverless technologies forces I&O professional to reassess and recalibrate their role in the organization. This session covers Gartner's outlook on cloud brokering, governance, management and skill changes for I&O personnel.

I&O leaders today are working aggressively in two specific ways: Provisioning infrastructure for business unit stakeholders and ingesting AI techniques to improve I&O efficiencies. Across several hundreds of Gartner inquiries and engagements, Gartner has identified I&O best practices that characterize highly successful and productive AI I&O ecosystems.

What are enterprises doing to insure data center and cloud strategies are aligned, and what is the end game?

In this session, we will explore use cases and case studies on how to innovate your storage by selecting innovating approaches in either public or hybrid cloud storage.

Software asset management tools have become popular; however, their diverse data requirements make the selection process challenging. By ensuring their SAM tool delivers four primary capabilities, infrastructure and operations leaders will choose the right SAM tool to support their enterprise goals.

As IT infrastructure and application increases in complexity due to cloud, mobile and new architectures, incumbent ITOM provider offerings are being rendered ineffective. Even new and emerging providers, with their narrow focus, often find themselves at a disadvantage as they are not able to cover a broad and ever-changing IT environment. Understand what are the key trends in the vendor landscape, their capabilities and how you can optimize your IT monitoring strategy.

I&O leaders are under pressure to support business growth, deliver competitive differentiation and minimize ongoing costs. Delivery of nonresilient infrastructure must be carefully scrutinized to avoid negative cost implications in the medium to long-term. This session will explain that resilience needs to be a key part of infrastructure delivery planning, but devising a pragmatic approach is key to ensuring success in a bimodal, cloud-embracing environment.