Ontario IT & Security Leaders Forum

The world now depends on the digital economy. IT is central to the organization’s successful response and there are four pillars of strength required: re-coding the institutional DNA, treating security as survival, responding to the new relationship with work, and reducing the bureaucratic burden.

Presented by: Info-Tech Research Group

Zero Trust has got to be one of the most talked about themes in cyber security. While the term means different things to different people, there are two things that can be agreed on: it’s a journey worth taking and micro-segmentation is a key pillar of that journey. The next question always is how do you get started? Regardless of the sophistication of ransomware, the end goal is always the same: get in through a vulnerability and move laterally through your network.

Join this presentation as we help peel back the layers to provide you simple steps to protect yourself from these threats that include:

• Gaining visibility to where you are the most vulnerable
• Closing risky ports
• Leveraging tools you already have in place without adding layers of complexity

While the journey can seem intimidating, we’ll help you realize that it doesn’t take a team of 100 or a PhD to deploy zero trust micro-segmentation that will protect your organization and keep ransomware at bay.

Presented by: Illumio

Work from home is here to stay. How do we maximize our team’s productivity in a WFH and hybrid environment?

Speaker: Zain Haq, Senior Manager – Tech & Cybersecurity Audits, Manulife Financial

Your business is in danger. Be innovative or become irrelevant. This talk will be a fun look at common problems with modern businesses, how to avoid them, and how to thrive.

Metaphors to live by:

• Overcoming layer 8 and layer 9 problems (people alignment)
• Pulling the sled in the same direction (goal alignment)
• Taking inventory ( as-is & to-be of processes, and the gaps between them)
• Meteor detection, deflection, and mining (conventional and not so conventional (yet sensible) Ideas about retooling)
• New Habitats (re-imagining worlds and the enterprises that will thrive there)
  

Speaker: Mike Bachman, Global Architect & Principal Technologist, Boomi

Presented by: Boomi

Check back for updates on this session.

Speaker: Jeff Stark, CISO, Fasken

30-minute open table discussion followed by a 25-minute panel to present individual table findings

When companies are limited in their thinking or their mindset towards a diverse and equitable, and inclusive workforce, they’re limiting the top talent that they can actually recruit to their organization.

With hiring talent and proficient employees at a premium, this session will address the intersection between promoting diversity and its impact on creating a better, more efficient and diverse organization.

Topics include:

• Reviewing talent acquisition and retention strategies
• Creating space for cultural shifts to take place
• What is leaderships role in diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace?
• DE&I Challenge – Addressing resistance to change

Moderator: Claude Sam-Foh, Chief Architect, Centennial College

Panelists: Chine Nkado, Manager, Business Intelligence, Region of Peel

It is often said that’s it’s the journey that matters more rather the outcome, yet in enterprise settings it’s the successful outcomes that drive innovation and future investments.
Low success rates of AI/ML projects and complexity of their executions are often key reasons why LOB’s (Lines of Business) are hesitant in investments necessary to redefine and modernize their businesses.
Admittedly, challenges are overwhelming; data silos, wide landscapes of data repositories, regulatory compliance, and lack of IA (Information Architecture) often become roadblocks to successful projects.

Meet Data Fabric; an architecture that facilitates the end-to-end integration of heterogenous data pipelines and cloud environments through the use of intelligent and automated systems.
Data fabric’s architectural approach simplifies data access in an organization to facilitate self-service data consumption and enables definition and enforcement of IA (Information Architecture).

In this talk we will examine emerging Data Fabric architecture, the promise it brings and challenges it helps to solve. We will take a journey through all stages of application development lifecycle and discuss Data Fabric role in each of them.

From definition and enforcement of IA (Information Architecture), through decentralized and governed data access, to seamless integration with ML/AI lifecycle, Data Fabric architecture will help us integrate, eliminate data and organization silos, and drastically reduce time to value while providing observability and lineage of data lifecycle.

Speaker: Piotr Mierzejewski, Vice President Development Watson Applications, Cognos and Planning Analytics IBM Data & AI, IBM

Business leaders are constantly challenging their IT organizations to accelerate innovation while reducing costs and increasing performance. Migrating to the cloud offers many benefits, including cost efficiency and seamless scaling with a much lower risk of downtime or disruption. Often, data modernization projects stall because of unforeseen costs and challenges. IT teams consistently benefit from working with Onica’s experienced cloud engineers. They can architect and design a proper cloud database environment that meets these objectives and work with your team to ensure success.

How can organizations navigate this journey to achieve a successful cloud migration?

Key Takeaways:

Identify your database modernization challenges
Explore database modernization trends and options
Learn how to build a strategy to migrate and modernize legacy on-premises databases in the cloud.

Speaker: Bojan Andjelkovic, Senior Customer Solutions Architect, Onica by Rackspace Technology; Pierre Collard, Partner Solutions Architect (AWS Architect Pro, CCIE Enterprise), Amazon Web Services (AWS)