The role of IT in business, IT security, Big Data, BYOD and cloud computing, and networking and applications were all important topics discussed among the thousands of IT professionals who made their way to New York for the annual Interop IT conference last week. A host of workshops, keynote speeches, and in-person discussions with technology leaders and innovators gave attendees plenty of technical information to bring back to the office.
In case you missed the event, or if you attended but would still like a quick refresher of the highlights, we’d like to catch you up. Let’s take a look at the top five areas of discussion:
William Murphy, chief technology officer of Blackstone Innovations and Infrastructure, gave one of the keynote speeches, “Is IT Irrelevant?” He said the IT brand is broken at many companies, and it needs to be fixed before technologists can create value for the business, a Wall Street & Technology article reports. In addition to being technologists who know how to manage risk and implement management processes, technology leaders must be a “salesperson, relationship manager, financial analyst, mentor and recruiter, and culture creator,” Murphy says.
CISO Shares Strategies for Surviving the Inevitability of Attacks
Another Blackstone leader, Chief Information Security Officer Jay Leek, spoke at Interop about security, and how businesses must double down on smarter detection of threats and attacks rather than the traditional approach of mainly trying to prevent them, Dark Reading reports. “The reality is that bad guys have much more time on their hands than we do,” Leek says. “If you’re focused on prevention and not much on detection, you are flying blind sometimes because you don’t necessarily know where you’re headed.”
Big Data Success: 3 Companies Share Secrets
For businesses using Big Data to gain a competitive advantage, it’s important to start with a focused, business-driven project; make sure the data is consistent with your vision; and then apply advanced analytics without moving beyond human-understandable decisions, InformationWeek reports in its coverage of a Big Data panel at Interop. Panelist Arnab Gupta, CEO of Opera Solutions, stressed how data should be able to be consumed by ordinary business users: “If we’re going to need 500,000 data scientists to make sense of information as some people are saying, Big Data is doomed to failure,” he says.
Protecting the Network From Bring-Your-Own Vulnerabilities
Another Dark Reading article on Interop takes a look at BYOD and how the human element is the most important aspect in implementing security controls on devices — because no matter how much businesses may resist, BYOD is here to stay. “End users are really becoming part of the security model. The attacker is using them as a launching point into the network,” says panel speaker Frank Andrus, chief technology officer for security provider Bradford Networks.
Intelligent Networks to Support App Economy, Says Cisco’s Chambers
John Chambers, chairman and chief executive officer at Cisco, was the main keynote speaker at Interop this year. In his speech, he gave particular attention to applications and networks, particularly on what he calls the “application economy,” SearchNetworking reports. “The future will be about applications. It will not just be the next big thing; it’s what will power our industry for the next decade,” Chambers says.
What else did you learn at Interop this year that you would share with your colleagues?