The FoxNet team was excited to once again attend the annual Southwest Ontario VMUG UserCon at Bingemans in Kitchener. We are active sponsors and look forward to seeing new faces and listening to industry leading keynote speakers every year!
We heard Scott Lowe and Larry Smith share their insights as the VMUG keynotes. If you missed this year’s VMUG conference, or you’re just looking for a refresher, we’ve listed some of the main points that stuck with us from each speaker’s presentation below.
Scott Lowe from VMware was the morning keynote speaker. Scott’s topic was “Root Causing Cloud Adoption.”
– Scott began by describing the NIST definition of cloud, stating that cloud consisted of:
- On demand self service
- Resource pooling
- Rapid elasticity
- Measured service
- Broad network access
– He followed his introduction by asking a few members of the audience to share their main concerns with cloud migration. The answers ranged from cost, security concerns, lack of resources, and the users.
– The best way to get yourself promoted is to make yourself replaceable (on the topic of cross training).
– Computers are great at automation, so operations shouldn’t be done manually. 80% of outages are due to human error.
The afternoon keynote speaker was Larry Smith from the University of Waterloo. His topic was “The Next Big Thing in IT.”
– Email isn’t a new thing; mail has been around since the 1800’s all we have done is improve it.
– The original network in North America was the train network, and overbuilding (over provisioning) of rail lines was basically re-lived with networking, remember Nortel?
– All of the improvements and efficiencies that IT was supposed to bring to business have not been realized; productivity has been flat lined for decades.
– One example of an industry where efficiencies have been made is banking – how often do people go into a branch any more, and how many tellers are there now?
Great food for thought. VMUG Southwestern Ontario is always well-attended with more than 250 at the event. For more information about the conference just give us a call at FoxNet, 519-886-8895.
