IT Roadmap - Boston

I was at the NetworkWorld IT Roadmap conference in Boston this week and came away with a couple of take away's that I would like to outline. The conference is a nice quick one-day conference that is free to most IT folks who are willing to complete a survey. They have a number of different Technology tracks that allow folks to learn about new products and strategies and it provides a decent opportunity to find out what others in your field are doing. I attended the Vitalization track in the morning and the Web 2.0 track in the afternoon.

I really enjoyed the first speaker David Escalante, Director of Computer Security at Boston College. His keynote was named "Securing and Open Environment" and his talk was something that I could relate to. His main points were ....

• Protect your data
• Don't trust the network
• Monitor and analyze everything
• Create a layered defense applying more protection the closer you get to your data.

The virtualization track was moderated by Andreas M Antonopoulos who is a founding partner at Nemertes Research. Andreas did a nice job defining and outlining virtualization for the new folks in the room, however the point that I took away from his talk was this ....

• Do not incorporate a virtualization strategy just for the sake of server consolidation, instead make sure that your virtual infrastructure is dynamic enough to provide redundancy and scalability.

While at PHCS, we deployed Virtualization and I justified it by making the Server Consolidation point, however with the current set of VMOTION tools in VMWARE, there is a great justification surrounding reliability and scalability of your virtualization strategy.

The Web 2.0 track was moderated by Irwin Lazar who is a Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence at Nemertes Research.  Irwin did a nice job delivering a lot of content about web 2.0, and enterprise 2.0 trends and strategies, and ended by outlining key challenges and strategies for enterprise adoption.

Irwin's recommendations for those considering deploying these technologies are to define your architecture and support plans and really understand your business process and demands before adopting these technologies in the Enterprise.