Workshop details

Developing a Strategy for Enterprise Roles

This workshop will cover how to develop roles for access control and how to evaluate role discovery and role management products. Roles will be examined from an IT perspective, focusing on the use of roles, rules, and policy to manage access rights. The workshop includes a discussion on experiences, results, and lessons learned from enterprises that have conducted role definition efforts. The workshop will conclude with recommendations on product evaluation and governance. Participants will also learn:

• How to apply popular role discovery techniques
• How to align IT roles to business responsibilities
• How to avoid the pitfalls of definition and management
• How to make roles integral to business management

Workshop details

Virtual Directory: The Multi-Purpose Identity Tool

Virtual directories enable organisations to implement identity management applications without tackling a major repository project. They enable identity repositories to participate in a SOA and are an important part of the identity services puzzle. We’ll survey the virtual directory market and discuss impacts of recent acquisitions. In the workshop, we’ll identify the sweet spots where virtual directories can reduce deployment time and complexity and discuss areas of potential concern, including caching, availability, performance, and entity relationships. We’ll assess the architectural implications of using a virtual directory to expose a web service via the LDAP protocol. Finally, we’ll step through the installation of a virtual directory to configure multiple back-end repositories, including a relational database and an LDAP directory.

The workshop participant will learn about:

• The different vendors in the virtual directory market, including their strengths and weaknesses
• The sweet spots where virtual directories can shorten deployment time
• The specific challenges of LDAP, relational database, and web service back-ends
• Areas within virtual directory deployments requiring special attention
• The installation and configuration of a virtual directory

Workshop details

SOA: Assesment And Planning

Are you ready for SOA? Where should you start? How will you specify actionable steps that will move your organisation away from project silos and towards a service-oriented mindset? What projects will bring you the most benefit? What areas of your organisation, architecture, infrastructure, or development practices need the most work? This workshop provides guidance and practical advice to help an organisation conduct a successful SOA initiative. Every SOA initiative should start with a self-assessment to gauge the organisation’s readiness for SOA and to recognize areas that need improvement, identify opportunities, and establish priorities. Once you know where you are, you can then plan a course to get to where you want to go. The workshop will describe the following tools that can be used to define and guide your SOA initiative:

• SOA maturity model framework
• Assessment surveys
• Recommendation templates
• Sample initiative roadmaps

Workshop details

Provisioning Deployment: Planning Considerations and Recommended Practices

User and resource provisioning continues to be one of the hottest topics in the identity management space. Regulatory compliance, administrative efficiency, cost savings, and tighter security controls are driving the provisioning market at a rapid pace. Nevertheless, organisations often reset their provisioning strategy—including vendor selection—multiple times before settling on a suitable user provisioning solution. This workshop will help attendees avoid costly failures by discussing enterprise experiences at successful organisations. The workshop will also look at the architectural components of provisioning solutions and help attendees determine which architectural approach is best for their environment. The instructor will discuss evolving trends in technology, project planning, design, and deployment of provisioning solutions. The workshop provide insight into a the following topics:

• Provisioning architectural components
• Business drivers and justification for provisioning deployments
• Provisioning market trends and the impact on your environment
• Tips for establishing an effective governance team
• Recommend best practices for a provisioning deployment

Workshop details

Gearheads Guide to the Corner Office

You were hired because you are a guru: an expert in one or more technologies who can craft working solutions with the newest techniques. Suddenly, you find yourself engaged in a budget exercise, or in a meeting sitting across the table from the CIO. Was this in the job description? It is now! In this workshop, members of Burton Group Executive Advisory Program will present practical advice for technologists who need to communicate with executives and business leaders, including:

• Identifying business drivers that lead to successful business cases
• Understanding the mind of the executive: what they really care about
• How to avoid technology rat-holes and stay on track in meetings
• Getting inside the business, without losing your technical chops
• Communicating complex ideas in multiple ways
• Advocating for infrastructure investment
• The art of presentation

Workshop details

Building iSCSI SANs

Due to the phenomenal growth rate of data, internal direct-attach storage can no longer scale to meet business needs. However, implementing a fiber channel Storage Area Networks (SAN) can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition. With the advent of the iSCSI, SANs are now a more attractive and inexpensive alternative to fibre channel. As data centres expand in space, consume more energy, low-cost infrastructures like iSCSI will play a significant role in the dynamic data centre. This workshop will guide SAN administrators in the art of building an iSCSI SAN. The presentation will include an overview of the pieces and parts of an iSCSI SAN and how they fit together to form a viable storage network. This in-depth workshop includes:

• Business case for iSCSI
• Building and managing an iSCSI target
• Using a software iSCSI initiator
• Discovery in an iSCSI world
• Boot from an iSCSI SAN
• LUN assignment and alternatives to zoning
• Multi-path in an iSCSI environment
• Security for the iSCSI SAN
• Integration of iSCSI and FC-based SANs

Workshop details

Unified Communications Trends and Strategic Overview

The proliferation of the term “unified communications”(UC) is increasingly applied to a broad range of communication and collaboration solutions. As a result, discussions related to UC can quickly create confusion and raise many questions within an enterprise IT organization.

This half-day workshop provides a strategic overview of UC and examines the key industry trends that enterprises must consider when developing a UC strategy. The workshop will include an unbiased overview and assessment of several of the broad UC application suites available from leading communication and collaboration vendors as well as a discussion on hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and blended service delivery models for UC. The topics this workshop will cover include:

• UC overview
• UC industry trends
• Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft UC strategies
• Hosted and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models
• Migration to UC from IP-PBXs and IM systems

Workshop details

Information-Centric Security: Growing from Leakage Prevention to Discovery and Beyond

Do you cringe when you read about a lost laptop? Are you nervous that your Internet connection might be a giant intellectual-property sieve? Despite widespread regulatory and contractual stipulations for data protection, chances are that you haven't developed a wholly effective architecture for thwarting sensitive information leakage across the organization. Even less likely is that you’ve dovetailed that effort with content management and e-discovery efforts. This workshop will strive to help fix that. After briefly examining the drivers for information-centric security, the workshop will walk through a systematic approach to achieving it.

• What are critical non-technical controls that help to keep data confidential?
• What technologies make sense in various infrastructure layers—perimeter, identity & access, point-of-use, and repositories?
• How can information protection align with content management and electronic discovery?
• When should encryption, rights management, network content filters, endpoint agents and other solutions be deployed?

Workshop details

Improving the Software Development Process

Once upon a time, you could create software with nothing more than a text editor, file management commands, and a compiler. Not so any longer. Software development has become a very complex process. A little investment in development infrastructure can automate complex processes, reduce time-to-delivery, improve development outcomes, and help avoid the following situations:

• “We’re halfway through the schedule, but only a quarter of the features are done”
• “We got the prior release out of source control, but some pieces are missing”
• “The lead developer’s machine crashed, and now we can’t get a good build”
• “That doesn’t look or work like what we expected!”
• “We made it into testing on time, but fixes are taking longer than expected”
• “Deploying the new release kept the system offline beyond the scheduled downtime – again.”
• “We didn’t see any problems in testing, but production’s a nightmare!”

Workshop details

Exploiting New Information Management Opportunities

Enterprises now have significant opportunities to consolidate information management systems into more powerful, responsive, and cost-effective infrastructure. With the advent of robust and high-performance XML data and content management in database management systems (DBMSs), it’s possible to have fewer moving parts and redundant information repositories. This workshop explores new enterprise information management opportunities, including trends such as:

• The convergence of structured and semi-structured information, with SQL and XQuery
• The role of SOA and data services
• E-discovery challenges and opportunities
• Content-related standards such as XML Schema, XQuery, and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
• The critical role of data modeling techniques and tools
• Migration and consolidation implications for traditional content management-related software product categories
• Superplatform information architecture competition dimensions, especially among IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle

Workshop details

Developing an Enterprise Network Architecture

This workshop teaches the skills IT managers need to develop an enterprise network architecture. Leveraging the Reference Architecture for Networks, the workshop will provide a decision-making framework and methodology for technology selection. The workshop will cover the principles, technical positions and template frameworks Burton Group has developed through its consulting experience with many large enterprises. Attendees will learn valuable technical information and understand how to create network plans that support business initiatives.

Topics this workshop will cover include:

• Network architecture value and benefits
• Network architecture development methodology
• Network architecture framework
• Architectural principles
• Technical positions: Network Protocols, IP addressing, Routing Protocols, QoS, IP Multicast, Switching and Routing, Local Area Networking, WAN/MAN Services, Wireless LANs, Remote Access, Resiliency, IP Telephony, Internet Access, Storage Area Networking, and WAN Performance Optimization
• Architectural templates: large/medium/small sites, campus, WAN/MAN, Internet access
• Creation of Gap analysis and migration plans
• Architecture implementation and review process

Workshop details

Server Virtualisation in the Enterprise: From A to Z

This workshop examines server virtualisation from the ground up, delving into the technical and organisational elements that drive successful virtualisation deployments. Key planning and migration challenges are addressed, with insights and examples regarding how to overcome the most difficult planning and deployment challenges. Organisations are faced with numerous virtualisation planning considerations, including hardware platform selection, virtualisation platform selection, VM placement, VM migration, storage and SAN integration, as well as data protection and recovery. Attendees will leave this workshop with knowledge of proven approaches toward virtualisation success as well as techniques for effectively managing and protecting virtualised resources in enterprise environments. This in-depth workshop covers topics including:

• Evaluation strategies and insight into all major server virtualisation platforms, including VMware, Microsoft, XenSource, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and SWsoft
• Methodologies and tools to successfully plan for virtualisation migrations
• Methodologies and tools to successfully migrate to a virtualised environment
• Virtual machine data protection and recovery
• High availability in a virtual environment
• Performance tuning and optimisation
• Advanced management and scripting

Workshop details

SharePoint and Office 2007: New Enterprise Collaboration/Content Opportunities and Risks

Microsoft SharePoint (composed of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is Microsoft's strategic collaboration and content server, and it has major implications -- with both good and bad potential -- for enterprise planning. As the server-side counterpart to Microsoft Office, and encompassing everything from blogs to enterprise content management, SharePoint has the potential to help organisations more effectively collaborate and manage content. If unsuccessfully deployed, however, SharePoint can exacerbate rather than advance enterprise collaboration and content management planning, with the potential for out-of-control content dissemination and explosive growth in unmanaged workspaces. This workshop, a one-day subset of a CCS consulting workshop, covers topics including:

• A SharePoint introduction, including enterprise challenges Microsoft seeks to address with SharePoint 2007
• Detailed analysis of SharePoint capabilities, maturity, and limitations, including identity management
• Deployment and governance considerations
• Competitive landscape projections