Workshop details

Identity Federation: A Tiered Approach to Integrating Authentication in the Enterprise

Federation enables loosely coupled identity management across autonomous business domains and extends the reach of applications. It is now becoming a strategic requirement for most enterprise infrastructures and adoption continues in multiple industries. Because the federation market is still developing, the challenges as well as the potential benefits can be significant.

This workshop provides insight into the results of federation implementations. It will discuss the efforts of OASIS, Liberty Alliance, web access management and platform vendors, with a focus on current capabilities and limitations, and convergence strategies. The workshop will provide information to help you evaluate whether federated identity fits your IT roadmap, as well as when and how to begin your adoption of these solutions.

Synopsis:

• The Business Case for Federation
• Federated Identity Concepts
• Federation Standards and Specifications
• Early Adopter Case Studies and Best Practices
• Identity Networks
• Comparing Federation to User-Centric Identity models
• Lessons Learned and Recommendations

Workshop details

WAN Performance Optimization

Data center consolidation, Voice over IP, SAN over WAN, and other new applications are increasing the pressures on enterprise networks. Some of these applications are very sensitive to the amount and type of bandwidth that’s available, but it is sometimes too expensive, or impossible, to obtain WAN links with all of the necessary characteristics. Worse, simply improving one characteristic, such as bandwidth, may have surprisingly little effect on application performance. Redesigning the applications is often impractical, performance suffers, and the network managers are blamed.

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

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
• Relevant performance measurement and pre-deployment testing
• Survey of WAN performance optimization appliances and software
• Detailed technical recommendations for applications designers

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

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

Virtual Directory: The Multi-Purpose Identity Tool

Virtual directories enable organizations 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.

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 centers expand in space, consume more energy, low-cost infrastructures like iSCSI will play a significant role in the dynamic data center. 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

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