Another successful Lighthouse event is in the books. On July 13th, we continued our quarterly event series with an eventful evening of speakers, music, food, and intelligent conversation about today’s top business technology issues. OpsCompass’ goal with Lighthouse has always been to expose customers to each other as well as other industry experts, to share ideas and hopefully gain insights that help solve budding business problems. This brand of dialog lets both our customers and attendees see which strategies are working and how companies around the country are leveraging platforms such as Microsoft Azure with great success. Lighthouse is about shedding light on the real world solutions that are producing the best results in today’s environment.
At this latest Lighthouse we included an intentionally diverse lineup of speakers to bring unique perspectives from healthcare, cyber security, academia, financial technology, and government. But the common theme of the evening was that the utilization of technology is now the single greatest determinant of whether or not organizations are even competitive within their respective industries or domains; and with that emphasis on innovative technology comes new challenges surrounding security, compliance, and process.
From this conversation came a somewhat counter-intuitive, yet keen insight: whether it’s a hospital CEO or the Department of Homeland Security, key decision makers are bypassing traditional data center infrastructure in favor of public cloud services because the latter provides the organization with seamless control and the ability to become even more secure and compliant.
Hearing about what’s really happening from real leaders at real companies leads to some very provocative conclusions about where technology is going and how to reap the greatest benefits. Since staying ahead is half of the challenge, here’s the full recap of what you missed at July’s Lighthouse:
Diverse perspectives on today’s most critical business technology issues
Our slate of speakers brought perspectives from both coasts, a variety of industries, and from areas of focus such as cyber security, HIPAA compliance, and software development.
- Microsoft Azure Cloud Strategic Insights & Mapping Business Requirements – Jeff Luna, Azure Technical Solutions Professional at Microsoft U.S. Health and Life Sciences
- Microsoft Azure Cloud Services – Dustin Trager, Azure Technical Solutions Professional at Microsoft
- Integrating the Microsoft Azure Cloud – Wendell Hutchison, Sr. Software Engineer, Home Instead Corp
- IoT Security and Why it Matters / Nebraska Applied Research Institute – W. Owen Redwood, PhD, Chief Cyber Researcher & Terry Reinert, Director of Cyber Security Research (NARI)
- Cloud Security & Operational Compliance – John Grange, Chief Technology Officer, OpsCompass
Microsoft Azure Cloud Strategic Insights & Mapping Business Requirements
Nationally, Healthcare organizations are using Azure for a lot more than just Windows workloads
Microsoft is now the world’s #1 contributor to open source and over half of all VM’s deployed on Azure IaaS are Linux based, not Windows Server. The most successful companies are leveraging Azure to avoid reinventing the wheel by using certified, compliant, pre-built Azure solutions that span the gamut of today’s technology.
Integrating the Microsoft Azure Cloud
Big data analytics, modern applications, and open source are now cloud first use-cases
In the central region our largest construction, healthcare, insurance, and transportation companies are focusing on some specific use cases to drive value through digital transformation.
IoT Security and Why it Matters / Nebraska Applied Research Institute
Sensors, building controls, mobile devices, and OT networks are under-managed IT systems
Small computers are embedded in everything from building controls to the vehicles we drive to work. The origin of computers can span decades but they nonetheless represent a nascent security risk for firms in the new world. Corporate IT security has always ignored what we now call Internet-of-Things, but now, these sorts of technology assets represent a material IT risk that requires new tools, processes, and attention.
Cloud Security & Operational Compliance
Rapid change, Internet-of-Things, and cloud enabled business require purpose built tools
Frictionless change, more people involved, API driven management, and the preeminence of compliance regulations beg the need for new tools and new approaches. OpsCompass as a company is Azure focused and our core product, Helm, is deeply integrated into the Azure Resource Manager API. We’re building the tools that translate traditional IT policies, auditing, and compliance into the cloud-native capabilities that make it cheaper and easier to do those things in the cloud than they were before.
In short, the Lighthouse event was excellent. For more information about past and future events, please contact jgrange@opscompass.com.
