6th Annual Conference. June 04, 2014. San Francisco

Program Tracks and Topics

The Sixth Annual Cloud Slam 2014 Conference brings together a global alliance of thought leaders, professionals, corporations and users to expand their opportunities through keynote sessions, panel discussions and general sessions, contributing to a more precise understanding of the definition, adoption and development of cloud, enriching the dialogue between users and providers. This year's Cloud Slam explores how the cloud can facilitate business transformation with key success metrics focussing on increased productivity, higher efficiency, greater operational transparency, better regulatory compliance and ultimate customer satisfaction. Following topics will provide a framework.

  1. Cloud Advocacy and Assurance
  2. Governance, security and compliance
  3. Implementation and Management - Getting More Agile
  4. Optimization of Total Cost of Ownership, ROI and Overall Efficiency
  5. Buying and Selling Cloud for Faster Growth and Higher Profitability
  6. Business Continuity and Resiliency
  7. What's ahead?

1) Cloud Advocacy and Assurance

Average cloud adoption rate is above 60% across many enterprises, however the other 40% still want a few of their concerns to be addressed. Typical questions, that we'll try to answer are below:

- what is cloud is and how best is it to use based on individual business needs, justifying when to use the cloud;
- How to address concerns of terms and conditions of service. Developing an agreement template to act as a guideline for Cloud agreements.
- Is cloud a new bubble or hear to stay. Where is the future of cloud?
- What should an organisation keep in house and what should it put on the cloud?
- What is the status of the Cloud in relation to the NSA scandal?
- There is a tradition to consider that core applications have to run internally, usually on high-end machines. How has that changed in the recent years? Who are the businesses that started migrating them to the cloud and who are the ones that are still reluctant?
- What are compelling business and customer use cases for cloud?
- How to change the chip from using on premise solutions to cloud solutions?
- What is hybrid cloud computing? Why hybrid cloud computing? How do you deploy it?
- What is market adaption and size of different kinds of cloud?
- What is the main driver for cloud computing - cost or agility?
- How to to address uncertain demand and unified licensing?
- How to deal with bad internal infrastructure and lack of competent client IT support?
- What are mitigation stratetgies for cloud provider dissolution?
- Barriers for change from traditional IT model to the new cloud based IT model
- What are the key issues that customers have, when migrating to cloud solutions
- Effective migration and transition strategies to cloud based services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS);
- Historical deployment success rates of cloud vs. on premise software for particular categories of software (i.e. CRM, HCM, etc.)
- How is the education gap being addressed between businesses and cloud providers? How is a lack of broadband access impacting adoption of the cloud?

2) Governance, security and compliance

Trust is good, but certainty should be demonstrated. This track will highlight cloud security breakthroughs in all aspects on which enterprise is subject to regulatory bodies control. Attendees will take back actionable insights on cutting edge solutions from the forefront of cloud innovation:

- Centralized cloud governance model;
- Achieving service availabilty with higher security at a lower cost level;
- How security is built-in in cloud services;
- Auditing and life cycle management;
- Enabling data integrity, privacy and security for integrations;
- Adopting cloud standards
- Security and protection of IP and sensitive data in the cloud;
- Enforcing data constraints on residency and privacy;
- Making data available in reliable and secure way;
- Moving away from on-premise solution to the cloud;
- Getting high performance, while preserving security
- Using big data to mitigate advanced persistent threats;
- Solutions for cross firewall collaboration.
- With Cloud, as with any other maturing industry, approaching a phase of significant M&A, what can/should be done to protect the consumers of Cloud services?

3) Implementation and Management - Getting More Agile

This track will provide IT executives with best practices on successful operational models and architectural approaches, that provide flexibility to adjust budget and needs and help tackle following challenges:

- Complexities of managing multiple clouds,
- Leveraging the power of mobility to increase workforce productivity
- Converging private and public clouds to facilitate interaction of both internal or external businesses,
- Migration, deployment & integration;
- Orchestration of workload and data among multi-vendor clouds to optimize performance, capacity and cost,
- Network brokerage for cloud,
- Rapid provisioning of resources without delay in response to changing business needs
- Integrating business apps in the cloud, meeting all performance and capacity needs
- Simplified migration application pools, used as hosted virtual desktop infrastructure,
- Organization of enterprise cloud apps and interoperability with Office 365 and Amazon Cloud,
- Building a secure and controlled environment for trusted and connected users, devices and apps, by developing a successful identity and access management strategy;
- How to incorporate cloud services into internal processes and operations (service desk, monitoring, change management, asset management);
- Deployment automation and system replication between public and private clouds

Industry experts will also share updates on advancement of disaster recovery and storage technology in cloud offerings, sharing data cloud to cloud, latest developments in management of email, unified communication, big data analytics, collaboration, easier application evolution and much more.

4) Optimization of Total Cost of Ownership, ROI and Overall Efficiency

Benefits of cloud adoption has become more obvious, when business owners could match investment to results, seeing significant improvement of IT and services at the same cost. The outcomes of such strategies will allow users to focus and invest more on lines of business that produce revenue. This track will showcase the following topics:

- Successful strategies to cut regular costs and making IT costs more transparent,
- Increase ROI for typical cloud deployments and adoptions,
- Grow your business staying agile.
- Optimization techniques for major vendors like AWS, Google, Salesforce, Oracle and many others.
- Taking advantage of cloud and mobility (anytime, anywhere access to critical information to remain productive);
- Automation of provisioning - enterprise to enterprise,
- Facilitating ease of use and personalized/customized experience;
- Organization and availability of IT in a way, that solves everyday issues more efficiently;
- How cloud can increase productivty and engagement;
- Simplified management of cloud infrastructure, keeping IT up to date seamlessly and at an affordable price;
- Optimizing bandwidth and VPN costs
- Unification of technology management and better alignment with lines of business;
- Increasing speed to new capabilities and time to implement;

5) Buying and Selling Cloud for Faster Growth and Higher Profitability

Whether you are a cloud provider, channel partner or corporate buyer who is looking on how to increase time to market for your product or services, sessions of this track will provide invaluable industry insights on following:

- How to introduce cloud services to your customers;
- How to convince non-it businesses about the advantages of cloud concepts
- How 'standard' as a service offerings can be developed. (too many times customer modifications are accommodated by sales, which creates complexity not only in delivery, but also ongoing support)
- Enterprise customer features most sought after from a cloud provider;
- New trends to monetize cloud;
- How do you sort through all the different cloud solutions to determine if the company is on-boarding the best (functionality and cost) products for the companies needs.
- Successful examples of developing and sharing SaaS apps
- Services currently on offer from cloud service providers (e.g. best cloud services for big data analysis etc);
- Handling service turn backs and vendor transition out;
- Which industry can cloud would best match (contribute)?
- Cloud spending patterns by industry and forecast
- Addressing the fears of potential customers and best ways to discover new customers.

6) Business Continuity and Resiliency

Loss or damage to critical infrastructure can significantly impact any business operations and might lead to unpredictable consequences and adverse financial ramifications. Cloud becomes an important part of organization's continuity plan, providing effective prevention and recovery from internal and external threats, while maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity. Sessions in this track will give attendees actionable takeback on following topics:

- Available options on cloud backup, disaster recovery or business continuity;
- RaaS (Recovery as a Service) comparison analysis;
- Complete working framework to measure cloud IT and projects;
- Measuring the strategic key performance indicators in order to be in control;
- SLAs, High Availibility and reversibility;
- 24/7 resource availabitiy and collaboration with a global workforce;
- Strategies to mitigate vendor lock-in
- Operating cloud products offline

7) What's ahead?

In this track, we'll discuss the evolution of cloud, looking through our crystal ball, and make forecasts on future posibilities, expansion, growth, long-term vision of cloud, with these topics of interest in mind:

- Market segmentation and key trends/directional qualities of each of these segments;
- New emerging areas of cloud that are nascent;
- cloud services and the key areas/segments to watch;
- Status quo and future directions of PaaS and Cloud Services Brokerage Enablers. Are there any “big” players getting into this market?;
- Predictions in the battle of virtualized commodity hardware like VMware, EMC, VCE vs bare-metal camp like IBM and Oracle;
- Future considerations for cloud providers (private and public) when building their cloud;
- Future trends to engage in now to gain competitive advantage;
- When can the industry guarantee zero down time

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