The KeyNote speech is over ... Eric Hanselman took the audience on a data and compute journey through the past 1000 years.

We have a full house as we move into a discussion on Cybersecurity Trends in the 21st Century by Suprotik Ghose. Suprotik talks about how 74% of companies have been hacked and do not know about it ... but wait ... there is hope ... here is 

• Ensure the organization is aware of the problem and is not neglecting it
• Senior management must be awaree and supportive. There is a periodic update plan for Senior management and board
• Organization should perform a risk assessment on their situation - what data or systems matter s and is aware of their assests and where they are loaded. Also awaree of theri service providers
• Know your crown jewels
• Create a plan to protect the crown jewels
• Periodically test the plan
• Update & enforce password polices
• Limit access on your open wireless network.
• Educate and train employees and periodically update the plan
• Review the entire Network infrastructure and break up it up to prevent access
• Maintain a healthy security budget and don't be scare to use it

The User Summit is breaking into two tracks:

• The Radia & Sentient track is moving into a discussion about Windows 10, rollup patches and how this is relevant to Radia.
• The CloudPlatform track has a talk by Ian Rae, CEO CloudOps. Ian is discussing the Cloud Operations Manifesto.

Charul, Product Management AVP, has shared the Radia Patching Roadmap, which includes many exciting improvements to Radia Patch Management:

• Configure recurring acquisition criteria
• Entitle policies once to staging (test) and production groups
• Configure auto promote rules from staging (test) groups to production groups including checkpoints
• Deploy P2P together with bandwidth management

He's currently taking questions from the audience...

A Cloud Operations Manifesto was delivered by Ian Rae, CEO of CloudOps. Ian shared his insight based on his experience.

CloudOps has been cloud infrastructure experts since 2005 and it has designed and supports cloud.ca - a Canadian cloud service for business.

• Be nice to humans - As a Cloud operator, there is a growing need for effectively managing, developing, and retaining talent within team to achieve successful operation to customer and to maintain maximum efficiency within the team.
• Lego beats Playmobil - Both Playmobil approach (pre-fabricated) and Lego approach (customizable) have their own place in Cloud.
• Own your destiny .... with open source - Open source software doesn't solve every problem but it can give a lot more option and freedom to move as business requirement changes, compared to locked in to proprietary software.
• Automate all the things - Automation can give the assurance of service quality by repeating some processes time and time again. It will also help to "Be nice to humans".
• Multi-tenancy and API automation come first - They should be considered as must have, not optional requirement.
• Be wary of big vendors - One more reason to consider open source!
• Networks can't keep up - Network can be biggest pain point in massively scaled cloud deployment.
• Expect the unexpected! - Don't just expect the unexpected. Plan ahead and be prepared for the unexpected.
• Normalize components
• 24x7x365242199 continuous operations! -  Combination of automation, composable architecture, open source, and emerging technology such as container orchestration may help achieve this goal. 
• Customer centric - Listen to customer and give them what they want to be more customer centric.

We're off for a quick lunch ... 

Things are getting heated at the CloudPlatform panel discussion on the topic of 'Battle of the clouds - public, private or something even better?'. The panel is being hosted by Raj Ramchandani, GM of Cloud Products at Accelerite and the panel consists of:

• Jason Smathers - Autodesk
• Ian Rae - CloudOps
• Marcelo Oliveira - Cable & Wireless Communications
• Nara Rajagopalan - Accelerite

The panel discussion was kicked off with each participant sharing their stance on private clouds in general. Most of the panels agreed with the idea that private cloud would still be viable to a degree in the future. However there were mixed opinions and interesting discussion and insights regards the possible role of docker in the enterprise IT space in the future.

Jason Smathers & Sergey Levitskiy from Autodesk are presenting ‘What it takes to run a private cloud’. Autodesk has been running a large private cloud since 2011 when they started their journey with cloud.com and are now running the latest version of Accelerite CloudPlatform, 4.7.1. Their private cloud has not stopped growing with regions covering the globe, their growth is rapid:

• 2014 – 100,000 VM’s
• 2015 – 1,000,000 VM’s
• 2016 – 1,700,000 VM’s

Autodesk is also contributing to the CloudStack community and working closely with Accelerite to bring their contributions into the CloudPlatform product with a 3-6 month development lifecycle.

The Q&A session is now in full swing ...

Todd Grober (Sentient Product Management) hosted a great panel discussion between Dennis Hamilton (Commerce Bank), Brian Jakubowsky (Delta), Casey Brennan (PPG), and Miguel Lopez (Edward Jones) about endpoint management and security!

Some highlights:

Our panelists agree that a close relationship between security and IT operations is necessary and collaboration is essential to truly protect an environment. Casey pointed out that desktop teams are in the front lines of security, which is why engagement between both departments is so important.

Dennis thinks using one agent through one unified system for endpoint management and security would lower the complexity and make the solution easier to set up and easier to manage. However, a concern from the audience seemed to be that a second tool is usually necessary to report on the performance of the first tool. Miguel agreed, but said it was necessary to figure out where it makes sense to use separate tools and where it doesn't.

Brian and Miguel mentioned how useful a tool like Sentient could be in a war room situation, where information can be retrieved in seconds, instead of having to write a script and wait for hours to get the answer.

A proactive stance, where alerts are sent out if something happens on the client might be useful as well. As an example, Casey talked about clients with outdated software and how no one is really tracking them down. It would be interesting if Sentient could send out alerts on that.

Overall, a very productive conversation that will surely continue…

Daniel Kennedy, Director for Information Security at Voice of the Enterprise, has talked about security trends and the importance of information security/compliance.

Some of the following topics were discussed:

- Important security concerns in the future
- Preventing/Detecting insider espionage
- Top security pain points
- Reasons for implementing security projects
- Endpoint security operating systems
- Endpoint security in cloud
- Endpoint security effectiveness and current solutions
- Top endpoint security solutions
- Endpoint security inhibitors
- How to handle compromised endpoints
- Endpoint security’s primary users
- Endpoint security overall feature usage

Donghyun Lee from Korea Telecom (KT) is currently presenting 'Running a Public Cloud' to the Accelerite CloudPlatform track. KT was established in 1981 and is the largest public cloud provider in Korea.  KT launched their cloud initially as a private cloud for their own internal use but quickly realized the need in the market and used CloudPlatform to roll out their public cloud.

KT's uCloud runs over 25,000 VM's across 3,000 hosts with their largest customer vertical being the mobile gaming industry but are now seeing growth in the legacy enterprise market. To tailor to these markets KT provides cloud solutions in parallel with bare metal deployments for their customers.

Accelerite would like to thank all of our users for making the trip to Miami and a special thank you to all of the Accelerite users who have travelled internationally to share their insights and stories with the user community.

Accelerite is now presenting the beta release of Rovius which is due to launch in the summer. Two brave soles in Jayant Walvekar and Jaydeep Marfatia are going to demonstrate building a cloud as part of the final discussion session for the CloudPlatform track for today.

Rovius is a 'cloud in a box' product to provide and enterprise private cloud solution that integrates compute, storage and networking. The idea is rack to cloud in 60 minutes or less.

Jayant is logging into the Rovius appliance ... and here it is:

Sitting at the back of the room is an Accelerite Rovius server in a glass case, nicknamed 'Rovius 1' this is the concept of appliance delivery that can be quickly racked for super fast cloud deployment:

The demo is off and running creating a cloud environment, we see items in progress such as the zone has been built along with the pod and the cluster and host are being created whilst the primary storage is queued !

There is a beta program for early adopters of Rovius starting in the next few weeks, contact Accelerite Support at support@accelerite.com if you are interested in joining the program and are available to provide feedback on your experiences with Rovius.

OK - the Rovius Cloud demo is complete and a new cloud exists.

Charul, Pradeep, and Samir are showing off the latest version of Sentient, which has many impressive new features like alerts and event log queries. Many of the new capabilities allow the solution to be customized, like custom JSON queries, APIs and chained queries which make it possible to narrow down results with multiple conditions.

Charul demonstrated agentless management and remediation by querying cloud devices which generated a lot of interest from the audience.

They've assured us that Sentient's internal security features have always been and will continue to be a high priority in the development of the product.

They have also shown the ability to create customized dashboards, integrating Sentient data with information from other enterprise data sources to drill down into compliance or non-compliance trends across departments or geographic regions or any other metric of interest. The ability to identify compliance trends over time is particularly interesting and received kudos from the attendees.

The "Data analytics, IT automation, and the evolution of endpoint management" panel discussion has shed some light on the current state of corporations, and how big data coupled with automation could make a real difference to businesses. The discussion was hosted by Charul Sadwelkar, AVP, Accelerite, and consisted of:

Matt Brandt - Diebold
Don Krieger - Diebold
John Smolak - PPG
Mukund Deshpande - VP, Accelerite

The general consensus seems to be that the world is moving toward machine learning and automation. Consequently, big data provides many opportunities for companies; it's a matter of merging the data sets and extracting the relevant data. The ultimate goal is to become predictive (with high confidence levels) and proactive. One specific use case of interest to the attendees involves automated assessment of client health, using endpoint management to collect data and then automate remediation actions or alert support staff to impending problems before they occur.

We have now transitioned into a ShareInsights demo, where Mukund is showing the audience how big data could be used in an organization to extract value, using drag and drop technology to perform complex analytics and derive valuable insights from disparate data sources.

The Accelerite User Summit 2017 is winding down; it's been an awesome week with plenty of healthy discussion. Accelerite CEO, Nara Rajagopalan is wrapping up the conference with the Accelerite 20:20 session and providing detailed insight into Accelerite's vision of simple, automated IT.

We are looking to forward to hosting the Accelerite Users again next year and continue our journey together to Simplify & Secure the Enterprise Infrastructure. See everyone in 2018!