Workshop Details:

REST Easy

Anne Thomas Manes and Richard Watson

REST (Representational State Transfer) is gaining traction, but misunderstandings abound. REST is an architectural style, not a specific technology or protocol (e.g., HTTP or “Plain Old XML”). Renowned for its simplicity and elegance, REST defines a resource-oriented model that enables massive scalability and easy access to networked applications. The most ubiquitous implementation of the REST style is the Web itself. But the REST style is significantly different from traditional method-oriented development models. This workshop provides an explanation of REST and compares it with other distribution architectures. The workshop covers the following topics:

• Understanding REST
• REST, POX, and HTTP
• Using HTTP to build REST applications
• REST concepts and practices
• Advanced topics
• REST, WS-*, and SOA

Workshop Details:

Data Center Network Architecture

Jack Stackhouse

Looking three to five years out, data centers will experience rapid evolution to accommodate new technologies and requirements. Data and storage area networks will converge onto the same switch offering a la carte services that combine services (e.g., iSCSI and LAN traffic over the wire), or allow them to remain separate as ships in the night (FCOE). High-speed computing will require non-blocking switches. The cost for power will continue to rise. Heat is an issue as more equipment is packed tighter and tighter – Green is in, at a minimum, to save OpEx funds in a challenging economy. User, clients, partners and customers expect highly available, highly reliable applications and services requiring storage, server and network virtualization that will be complex to deploy, support and maintain. The competition will be doing this, like it or not, will you be able to keep up to survive?

Workshop topics will include:

• 10 Gigabit Ethernet to the server w/ non-blocking lossless “integrated fabric” switches
• SAN protocols and their network impact
• Top-of-rack and end-of-rack deployment plans
• CX4 (power, distance, cost, low latency) or CAT6a (distance, flexibility, longevity) wiring?
• Dual-homing with Layer 3 load-balancing or Layer 2 switching
• Network, server, and storage virtualization
• Routing on the server: Are we back to combined computer/router products?

Workshop Details:

Active Directory Bridge Products: Getting More Value from the Windows Infrastructure

Mark Diodati

Enterprises are deploying Active Directory (AD) bridge products, which have emerged as an effective tool for deriving more value from their AD infrastructure. These products (from Quest, Centrify, Likewise, and Symark) reduce costs by providing centralized identity management, authentication, sign-on reduction, and policy management for non-Windows platforms.

• We’ll Identify sweet spots where AD bridge products can assist with compliance goals, improve security and the user experience.
• Survey the AD Bridge market and discuss recent acquisitions.
• Discuss areas of potential concern, including UNIX namespace reconciliation
• Discuss the exciting merge of the AD bridge and "classic" UNIX security product classes (e.g., CA Access Control, Symark PowerBuilder, IBM TAMOS, and Fox Technologies BoKS)
• Step through the functionality of an AD bridge product, including installation, importing of UNIX users and their binding to existing Active Directory users, Group Policy Management of UNIX policies, authentication to UNIX resources against Active Directory, and single sign-on via Kerberos.

Workshop Details:

Advanced Network Security: Trends, Architecture, and Innovation

Phil Schacter and Eric Maiwald

Security defenses must evolve as enterprise networks, business practices, threats, and compliance requirements change. Coarse-grained network controls such as centralized firewalls are becoming less effective. While firewalls will remain important, network security in general will place greater reliance on identity-based policy enforcement and coordination with endpoint security functions. Security zones of trust will become more logical and less physical as they seek to accommodate outsourcing, virtualization, and other megatrends.

This workshop covers a number of opportunities for adapting defenses and raising the bar, including:

• Security overlays, based on cryptographically protected protocols, to enable creation of distributed, logical zones of trust
• Network control points positioned closer to protected resources with application- and identity-aware controls
• Trusted virtualization services to enable secure, compartmentalized client computing
• Use of network-enforced controls that are independent of topology and leverage user and device identity, such as Cisco new Trusted Security (TrustSec) framework
• Emerging policy services and infrastructure for networks and network applications

Workshop Details:

Developing a Strategy for Enterprise Roles

Dave Muelhling, and Anthony Randall

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 course 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:

Advanced Role Management: Connecting to Reality

Kevin Kampman

Role management initiatives are often challenged to demonstrate the relationship of business needs to technical solutions. Project teams need guidance to understand how an organization can best approach a role management program. In this hands-on workshop, Burton Group analysts and consultants will guide participants through a simulation of our own customer analysis process. Input from Burton Group customer interactions will be combined with participant perspectives in order to demonstrate how each participant’s organization aligns with others. Findings will then be derived from the combined information and used as a takeaway that participants can use to guide their own initiatives.

Note: Participants will receive a pre-conference assignment to gather information for the workshop.

During this workshop you will:

• Analyze your role management options and requirements
• Benchmark your organization against other organizations’ role management maturity
• Learn best practices for role management initiatives
• Discover common sources of role management initiative failure
• Map role management solutions to business requirements
• Build a role management initiative plan

Workshop Details:

Improving the Software Development Process

Kirk Knoernschild

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:

Provisioning and Beyond: Maximizing Your Investment in Provisioning Technologies

Lori Rowland, Ian Glazer and Alice Wang

Today’s volatile economy and budget restraints have forced organizations to consider how they can do more with existing technologies. Provisioning technologies, which were originally architected for basic user account management, are being extended to do password management, access approvals, self-service, audit and reporting, access certification, and even role management. Next generation provisioning systems will further expand and showcase deeper integration with HR systems, SIEM systems, physical/logical control systems, service management systems, and other applications. In this workshop Burton Group will discuss:

• The expanding business use case(s) for provisioning system – getting more out of your investment
• ROI metrics – beyond user account provisioning and de-provisioning
• Utilizing provisioning systems as a component of an asset management, license management, service management, contractor management, or application security strategy
• Future directions in the provisioning market –planning today for tomorrow’s next generation provisioning solutions

Workshop Details:

Notes from the Field: Social Networking in Action

Mike Gotta

Enterprises are asking themselves: do social networks offer real value or are they just an excuse for workers to waste time? To cut through the hype, Burton Group conducted an extensive study to discover how organizations are addressing social networking, listening to 21 organization tell their stories in over 30 interviews involving around 65 people from business and IT departments. The interviews covered topics such as making the business case, metrics, compliance, talent, generational shifts, community building, technology concerns, and cultural factors.

This workshop will discuss the study’s findings: what’s working, what isn’t, and how organizations are delivering real business value from social networking initiatives.

Specific areas covered will be:

• How we did it: the study’s methodology
• Getting started: business case, funding, measuring value & ROI
• Making it stick: culture, governance and adoption
• Shifting generations: strategic opportunities for HR
• Technology: platform approaches winning out

Workshop Details:

Advanced Server Virtualization

Chris Wolf and Richard Jones

This workshop examines advanced server virtualization topics, delving into the technical and organizational elements that drive successful virtualization deployments. Key planning and migration challenges are addressed, with insights and examples regarding how to overcome the most difficult planning and deployment challenges. Organizations are faced with numerous virtualization planning considerations, including hardware platform selection, virtualization 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 virtualization success as well as techniques for effectively managing and protecting virtualized resources in enterprise environments. This in-depth workshop covers topics including:

• Evaluation strategies and insight into all major server virtualization platforms
• Methodologies and tools to successfully migrate to a virtualized environment
• High availability in a virtual environment
• Performance tuning and optimization
• Advanced management and scripting

Workshop Details:

Network Performance Optimization

Eric Siegel

Data center consolidation, application performance demands, and bandwidth costs are increasing the pressures on enterprise networks. Simply improving one characteristic, such as bandwidth, may have surprisingly little effect on application performance. Redesigning the applications is often impractical, performance suffers, costs are high, and the network managers are blamed.

This intensive tutorial begins with a detailed technical analysis of the performance aspects of relevant protocols and their sensitivity to network characteristics, such as bandwidth and latency. It then discusses performance optimization techniques, network tuning best practices, and current optimization devices that provide compression, data reduction, wide area file services, caching, and protocol acceleration -- all with the goal of improving performance as seen by users while controlling network costs and not modifying the application.

The workshop includes a detailed discussion of available solutions and recommendations for choosing candidate WAN performance optimization solutions and for their subsequent evaluation, testing, and initial deployment.

Topics this tutorial will cover include:

• Performance aspects of relevant protocols, including TCP/IP, SSL, HTTP, and email and file transfer protocols such as MAPI, CIFS, and NFS.
• Compression, data reduction, and caching
• Protocol acceleration to handle inefficient protocols; comparison to wide area file services (WAFS)
• Special treatments for individual mobile users
• Quality of Service, including data flow tagging, queuing, and rate control
• Survey of specialty and general-purpose WAN performance optimization products
• Recommendations for presenting the project to management; writing requirements; selecting, evaluating and testing candidates; and handling deployment

Workshop Details:

Building Applications for Deployment in the Cloud

Chris Haddad

The Cloud promises to bring infinite scalability, unlimited availability, and increased responsiveness. Can applications realize cloud benefits through a simple off-premise server migration? Does Cloud require developers to re-write applications or port applications to proprietary Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments? This workshop will detail cloud application architecture patterns, cloud application frameworks, portability and migration strategies, and deployment topology considerations. It will answer the following questions:

• What principles shape the Cloud?
• What is PaaS and how is it different from other application platforms?
• What is the Cloud’s impact on application architecture and infrastructure?
• What is involved in migrating an application to the Cloud?
• What architecture roadmap should be chosen to make applications Cloud-ready?

Workshop Details:

Information Protection: Architecting for a Data-Centric Future

Trent Henry, Dan Blum and Gary Stanull

Network, host, and application controls will always be essential to an enterprise, but data protection is hitting a fever pitch of importance across the industry and will be a critical element of future security architecture. Information-centric protection acknowledges the new realities in IT: extensive outsourcing, cloud computing, new forms of collaborative work, data-oriented compliance requirements, and malicious attackers who go after private customer information and intellectual property alike. This workshop will set the stage for creating data-centric security architecture, including approaches to data leakage, encryption, presentation virtualization, rights management, electronic discovery, and more. Hand-in-hand with technical approaches, Burton Group will cover essential security program elements whose governance, policy, process, and training/awareness will result in effective architecture.

Workshop topics will include:

• 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, applications, 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?
• What are the security program elements that make a data-centric architecture effective

Workshop Details:

Data Center Economics

Nik Simpson, Drue Reeves, Richard Jones, and Jack Santos

This workshop examines some of the key aspects in reducing costs in the data center. Data center consolidation, efficient power and cooling designs, data center staffing and planning are addressed.

Reducing costs in the data center requires looking at all operational and architectural aspects in the data center from choosing the best data center location, hardware platform selection, power delivery chain management, cooling efficiency, virtualization platform selection, capacity planning, storage efficiency and SAN integration, and personnel management. However, reducing costs within the data center should not sacrifice business continuity. Attendees will leave this workshop with knowledge and approaches toward reducing data center costs without sacrificing application availability. This in-depth workshop covers topics including:

• Data center location
• Co-location, hosting, or do-it-yourself
• Storage efficiency and optimization
• Data center consolidation and migration strategies
• Power delivery and power reduction
• Cooling design
• Business continuity planning and business impact analysis

Workshop Details:

Application Security: Process, Tools, and Architecture

Ramon Krikken and Dave Muehling

Attackers go for low-hanging fruit, which means they now often focus on applications instead of infrastructure. Risks include vulnerabilities allowing unauthorized database access, exploitation of design errors to manipulate business logic, and attacks on end-users via cross-site scripting.

This workshop addresses three main areas of concern, showing the need for security teams to work with the development teams in a concerted fashion to combat these threats:

• First are common web application architectural and software errors, using the OWASP Top 10 as one of the guides. Attendees will be advised on how architects and developers can avoid introducing these vulnerabilities into their own applications.
• Second are methods for weaving security throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) - highlighting key processes and tools, such as code review and scanning, web application scanning, development practices, change control, and release processing.
• Finally, what are the latest models of application security architecture? Burton Group will explain its latest reference architecture work in this area, which includes coverage on XML/Web application firewalls and other application-layer security services.

Workshop Details:

Advanced Role Management: Connecting to Reality (REPEAT OF MORNING SESSION)

Kevin Kampman

Role management initiatives are often challenged to demonstrate the relationship of business needs to technical solutions. Project teams need guidance to understand how an organization can best approach a role management program. In this hands-on workshop, Burton Group analysts and consultants will guide participants through a simulation of our own customer analysis process. Input from Burton Group customer interactions will be combined with participant perspectives in order to demonstrate how each participant’s organization aligns with others. Findings will then be derived from the combined information and used as a takeaway that participants can use to guide their own initiatives.

Note: Participants will receive a pre-conference assignment to gather information for the workshop.

During this workshop you will:

• Analyze your role management options and requirements
• Benchmark your organization against other organizations’ role management maturity
• Learn best practices for role management initiatives
• Discover common sources of role management initiative failure
• Map role management solutions to business requirements
• Build a role management initiative plan

Workshop Details:

Developing an Enterprise Network Architecture

Jack Stackhouse

This workshop teaches the skills IT managers need to develop an enterprise network architecture. Leveraging the Reference Architecture for Networks, the workshop provides a decision-making framework and methodology for technology selection. It covers 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 covers 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:

Unified Communications Trends and Strategic Overview

Mark Cortner

The term “unified communications” is commonly applied to a broad range of communication and collaboration products and, as a result, discussions related to unified communication or “UC” may frequently cross many application and platform boundaries. This full-day workshop will focus on the market and technology trends related to the real-time communications applications components of UC. The intersection of presence-based voice/video applications with other collaboration applications such as instant messaging and web conferencing will also be discussed.

The workshop content will include an unbiased assessment of the UC vendor landscape with an emphasis on product and vendor positioning in the market. However as an alternative to premises-based UC products, it will also include analysis of new software-as-a-service (SaaS) and blended service delivery options for UC.

Workshop topics will include:

• UC overview and business value
• 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:

SharePoint 2007: The Current Governance Nightmare—and Will It Get Better?

Craig Roth, and Guy Creese

SharePoint 2007 has been a runaway success, offering Office-centricity and ease-of-use to workers interested in storing and sharing information. However, its ease-of-use is also a snare and a delusion, in many cases fostering uncontrolled proliferation of thousands of SharePoint sites that have different navigation, taxonomy, and security models.

This workshop addresses SharePoint infrastructure planning and governance issues as well as the future of SharePoint with these modules:

• SharePoint as an enterprise solution
• SharePoint governance
• SharePoint security
• Deployment pre-work
• Adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise
• The future of SharePoint and a glimpse at Office 14

Workshop Details:

MDM: Mastering Critical Business Information

Joe Bugajski and Joe Maguire

Master data management (MDM) is not “nice to have” or “wish we had.” For enterprise IT departments in these trying economic times, MDM is a must have. The “I” in IT means information. Certainly, IT organizations must manage development and systems (the “T” in IT). However, information is business, and any IT department that cannot manage master data effectively is in danger of going the way of the dinosaur when technology outsourcing, the cloud, SaaS, and the economic recession hits IT.

• MDM: the process is pivotal
• It's all about semantics
• Kinds of mismatches that MDM can detect and resolve
• What are the solutions to data mismatches?
• Data Governance and Stewardship.
• The roadmap for success