Conference Program

8:00 am - 9:00 am - Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00 am - 10:00 am
How to Design and Implement a High Availability IT Infrastructure to Support Your Business

Every day it becomes even more important for an organization’s IT infrastructure to respond and adapt quickly to business needs.  Taking it a step further the IT infrastructure must be highly available and fully redundant in the event of unforeseen disasters.  IT infrastructures have evolved with different technologies to be more efficient and in many cases more complex.  Paradoxically, the more complex and involved systems have become the more they can actually undermine efforts to achieve high availability. 

In this session attendees will learn: 

• Steps to make your complex IT infrastructure highly available
• An analysis (BIA, Cost of Downtime, RTO, RPO) framework for determining high availability requirements for your organization
• An understanding of the different levels of high availability and which one is sufficient for your organization’s needs
• How to understand the business drivers of high availability and how they will affect your financial investments

10:00 am - 10:30 am - Refreshment Break

10:30 am - 11:30 am
Haste Makes Waste:  Determining What is Necessary vs. What is a ‘Nice to Have’

After you have determined how to make your IT environment more resilient, you need to figure out what additions need to be made to your infrastructure.  Many vendors will promise you ‘the world’, but the key is deciding what is necessary to achieve the level of resiliency/high availability that your organization requires without spending unnecessarily.

In this session, you will learn a process to help determine where you need to spend and areas that you can avoid to achieve the level of resiliency required by the organization to support your business objectives.

11:30 am - 12:30 pm 
Prioritizing Critical Applications: How to Determine Which Applications Are Most Important During a Disaster

The applications are clearly vital to a business holding its own during a disaster.  With a highly available infrastructure supporting your mission critical applications you increase the likelihood that all those applications will keep business operations steady during a disaster.  But in the event that you have to make a choice, how do you identify and prioritize the top applications that are needed for your business to survive.

In this session, attendees will learn a methodology to evaluate each application and identify all available information necessary for a prioritized critical application recovery.

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Luncheon

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm 
How to Ensure Availability When Migrating from the Physical to Virtual World

Rob Peglar, Vice President, Technology, Xiotech Corporation

Talk of virtualization seems to be everywhere today.  Many organizations are realizing economic savings from virtualization technology implementations.  IT financial benefits include reduced numbers of servers, reduced power and cooling costs, and reduced operational impact as IT demands increase.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• How to take advantage of your investment
• How to find operational savings, while reducing  RTOs and RPOs.
• Specific areas that must be covered when implementing DR capabilities within your virtualization infrastructure and environment
• How to reconfigure resources from the virtual pool that can take on the regular production workload

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm Refreshment Break

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
How to Create and Implement Effective IT Infrastructure SLAs That Align Specifically to Your Business Needs

The importance of SLAs for your IT infrastructure cannot be understated.  But where do you start?  How do you define them?  How do you know what is realistic to expect when negotiating SLAs with your suppliers and your internal units within the enterprise?

In this session attendees will learn how to:

• Map out a checklist of SLAs that you can put to work immediately
• How to define SLAs with your suppliers and your internal ‘customers’
• How to work with different stakeholders so they each know their roles when a disaster hits

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
How to Justify Funds for Your High Availability Environment (panel discussion) 

No one can predict when a disaster will occur.  Although DR/BC funds should be a top priority, the reality is that many projects are competing for limited a limited IT budget. In DR/BC it can be difficult to prove ROI with absolute certainly.  There does not appear to be an obvious correlation between money invested and dollars earned. As a DR/BC professional, you know that the ROI is not having the business go under. However, you must be able to justify the dollar investment or the project will not move forward. 

In this session attendees will learn from a panel of seasoned DR/BC professionals as to how they win the fight for funding by being able to articulate the business reasons and why the project should take priority over other IT projects.

Each attendee will receive a certificate awarding 7 CPE credits for CISSP continuing education, in addition to 0.7 CEUs and 7 PDUs. CISSP is a registered certification mark of (ISC)², Inc.

What You Will Learn

• How to Design & Implement a Resilient Infrastructure
   
• Enterprise involvement and buy-In of the business continuity plan
   
• Tools and techniques to be used when implementing a BC/DR plan
   
• Shared experiences of how other IT departments are effectively managing DR/BC
   
• How to identify and minimize risks to your most business critical-business systems
   
• How to make sense of the different high-availability & clustering technologies
   
• How to implement effective backup and restore
     
• How to Test Your Infrastructure Plan
   
• How to Refine Your Infrastructure/Data Center Plan

Conference Price: $199.00 per person