Monday 22 October - Thursday 25 October

Workshop details

Advanced Considerations for Mature Identity Management (IdM) Deployments

This session is aimed at organisations that have already deployed IdM services and are in their second, third, or higher deployment cycle. The topics to be discussed come from real world experiences and deployments. The areas of discussion are:

• Determining your next area of coverage
• Developing identity data services—a foundational element of the Burton Group Reference Architecture
• Advanced use of IdM technologies such as virtual directories, federation, and integration tools
• Governance models for solving business issues such as compliance and audit

Workshop details

Security Metrics that Matter

Can your enterprise count on you? What security metrics are in your repertoire? Security professionals are seeking some sort of ‘holy grail’ of metrics often without a clear understanding that metrics come with different objectives – productivity, quality, cost effectiveness and, in security, risk management. The secret to a strong metrics program is understanding your objectives. This session will explain the most popular objectives for security metrics programs and provide specific guidance in decision making and resource allocation in order to meet those objectives. Attendees will leave with instructions on calculating information asset value, quantifying risk, measuring productivity, and evaluating cost effectiveness.

Workshop details

Role Management: Developing a Strategy for Enterprise Roles

This workshop will cover how to develop roles for access control and how to evaluate role discovery and role management products. Roles will be examined from an IT perspective, focusing on the use of roles, rules, and policy to manage access rights. Participants will also learn popular role discovery techniques. The workshop will cover how to align IT roles to business responsibilities, and discuss the opportunities and challenges this approach presents. The course includes a discussion on experiences, results, and lessons learned from enterprises that have conducted role definition efforts. The workshop will conclude with recommendations on product evaluation and governance.

Workshop details

Network Performance Optimisation

Data centre consolidation, Voice over IP, and other new applications are increasing the pressures on enterprise networks. Some of these applications are very sensitive to the amount and type of bandwidth that is available, but it is sometimes too expensive, or impossible, to obtain WAN links with all of the necessary characteristics. Worse, simply improving one characteristic, such as bandwidth, may have surprisingly little effect on application performance. Redesigning the applications is often impractical, performance suffers, and the network managers are blamed. This intensive workshop therefore begins with a detailed technical analysis of the performance aspects of relevant protocols and their sensitivity to network characteristics. It then discusses performance optimisation techniques, network tuning best practices, and current optimisation devices such as advanced compression, caching, and protocol spoofing appliances -- all with the goal of improving performance as seen by users while controlling network costs and not modifying the application.

• Performance aspects of relevant protocols, including TCP/IP, SSL, HTTP, and commonly-used email and file transfer protocols
• Compression and caching; comparison to wide area file services (WAFS)
• Protocol spoofing to handle inefficient or ping-pong protocols at both network and application levels
• Quality of Service, including data flow tagging, queuing, rate control, and route selection
• Content distribution networks
• Relevant performance measurement
• Survey of WAN performance optimisation appliances
• "Best Practices" recommendations for network and applications designers, including realistic pre-deployment testing

Who Should Attend
Anyone who is responsible for building and managing the performance of WANs at both network and applications levels.

Workshop details

Federation Gathering Momentum

Federated identity, the exchange of information within and between enterprises, provides authentication and authorisation capabilities. Federation enables loosely coupled identity management across autonomous business domains and extends the reach of applications. It is now becoming a strategic requirement for most enterprise infrastructures and adoption continues in multiple industries. Organisations investing in federation are still seen as early adopters. Because the field is still developing, the challenges as well as the potential benefits can be significant. This workshop is designed to provide insight into the results of early implementations. It will discuss the efforts of OASIS, Liberty Alliance, web access management and platform vendors, with a focus on current capabilities and limitations, and convergence strategies. The workshop will provide information to help you evaluate whether federated identity fits your IT roadmap, as well as when and how to begin your adoption of these solutions.

• The Case for Federation
• Federated Identity Concepts
• Federation Standards
• Early Adopter Case Studies and Best Practices
• Identity Networks
• Federation, User-Centric Identity, and the Identity Metasystem
• Lessons Learned and Recommendations

Workshop details

Provisioning Deployment: Planning Considerations and Recommended Practices

User and resource provisioning continues to be one of the hottest topics in the identity management space. Regulatory compliance, administrative efficiency, cost savings, and tighter security controls are driving the provisioning market at a rapid pace. Experiences are unfolding as enterprises increasingly invest in and deploy provisioning solutions. This workshop will review the practices in place at successful organisations and discuss evolving trends in project planning, design, and deployment. Additionally, the workshop will review vendor solutions and technological approaches. With its in-depth knowledge and increasing real-world experience, Burton Group will advise you on how to plan, design, and deploy a provisioning solution within your organisation.

Workshop details

Data Leakage Control: Protection Strategies and Approaches

Do you cringe when you read about a lost laptop? Are you nervous that your Internet connection might be a giant intellectual-property sieve? Despite widespread regulatory and contractual stipulations for data protection, chances are you haven't developed a wholly effective architecture for thwarting sensitive information leakage across the organisation. This workshop will strive to help fix that. After briefly examining the drivers for confidentiality, the workshop will walk through a systematic approach to preventing data loss. Although it will cover some of the critical non-technical controls that help to keep data confidential, the bulk of time will be spent examining technical approaches to private data protection. By walking through the critical security infrastructure layers—perimeter, identity & access, point-of-use, and repositories—attendees will learn the strength and effectiveness of important content control techniques, such as encryption, rights management, network content filters, and endpoint agents.

Workshop details

Developing an Enterprise Network Architecture

This full-day workshop teaches the skills IT managers need to develop an enterprise network architecture. Leveraging the Reference Architecture for Networks, the workshop will provide a decision-making framework and methodology for technology selection. The workshop will cover the principles, technical positions and template frameworks Burton Group has developed through its consulting experience with many large enterprises. Attendees will learn valuable technical information and understand how to create network plans that support business initiatives.

Topics this workshop will cover include:

• Network architecture value and benefits
• Network architecture development methodology
• Network architecture framework
• Architectural principles
• Technical positions: Network Protocols, IP addressing, Routing Protocols, QoS, IP Multicast, Switching and Routing, Local Area Networking, WAN/MAN Services, Wireless LANs, Remote Access, Resiliency, IP Telephony, Internet Access, Storage Area Networking, and WAN Performance Optimisation
• Architectural templates: large/medium/small sites, campus, WAN/MAN, Internet access
• Creation of Gap analysis and migration plans
• Architecture implementation and review process

Who Should Attend
This workshop is designed specifically for enterprise network architects and technologists involved with network planning, network designers and consultants, and integrators and VARs.

Workshop details

SOA: Soup to Nuts

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an approach to system design in which the core unit of design is a shared, reusable service. SOA can deliver numerous benefits, such as increased flexibility and agility, reduced cost of ownership, better alignment between IT and business, and improved consistency and compliance. But SOA requires significant changes in the way projects are funded, designed, developed, managed, and maintained. This full day workshop examines SOA from many different perspectives, including an overview of SOA; SOA technologies and infrastructure; service-oriented design approaches for business logic, data access, and infrastructure functionality; and SOA governance programs. Time will be set aside during the day to allow participants to discuss their experiences (good and bad) in a birds-of-a-feather (BOF) like setting.

Workshop details

SharePoint and Office2007: New Enterprise Collaboration/Content Opportunities and Risks

Microsoft SharePoint (composed of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is Microsoft's strategic collaboration and content server, and it has strategic implications -- with both good and bad potential -- for enterprise planning. As the server-side counterpart to Microsoft Office, and encompassing everything from blogs to enterprise content management, SharePoint has the potential to help organisations more effectively collaborate and manage content. If unsuccessfully deployed, however, SharePoint can exacerbate rather than advance enterprise collaboration and content management planning, with the potential for out-of-control content dissemination and explosive growth in unmanaged workspaces.

• A SharePoint introduction, including enterprise challenges Microsoft seeks to address with SharePoint 2007
• Detailed analysis of SharePoint capabilities, maturity, and limitations
• Competitive landscape projections