Emerging IT Trends Shape Interop Digital 2020

For over 30 years, the Interop conference has been at the forefront of the IT industry, tracking the changes and the issues that matter most.

The 2020 edition of Interop will be like no other in the conference's history as the event – like so many others in 2020 – has migrated to a virtual all-digital format. Yet the event continues the tradition of addressing important and emerging IT trends and topics and concerns that IT professionals need to know about. Lenny Heymann, head of content for Interop Digital says one of the key themes across the different conference tracks and sessions is the need for resilience.

"I just see the theme of resilience everywhere, from infrastructure to leadership, to all the ops areas including DevOps and AI ops," Heymman said. "Everybody's talking about how to not just sort of ‘make do’ with the current situation, but how to be more resilient."

Keynotes at Interop Digital 2020 Focus on IT’s Future

Headlining the event are three keynotes that will provide insight and direction on the current and future state of IT, including key emerging IT trends.

Alyssa Taylor, corporate vice-president at Microsoft is speaking about the democratization of data and how it can help to enable digital transformation. In the keynote, she'll address how traditional IT processes can evolve to meet the demands of today, and include use cases illustrating workable strategies.

Greg Lavender, SVP and CTO of VMware, will be giving a forward-looking keynote about how IT leaders can focus on innovation even during difficult times. Rob Carter, EVP Information Services and CIO at the FedEx Corporation, will hold a fireside chat keynote in which he'll share lessons learned from managing a globally distributed infrastructure during an unprecedented time of demand and field attendee questions.

Interop 2020 Virtual Format Set to Encourage Networking

A key part of Interop over its history has been the networking opportunities it has brought to attendees. Heymann emphasized that Interop Digital 2020 will continue that tradition.

"We're doing something called Undustry Connect, which allows some of the vertical market attendees to meet one another and we have lots of interactive sessions as well," he said. "So I do hope that people come and are ready to participate, because there's lots of opportunities to do that."

Sessions Not to be Missed at Interop Digital 2020

Interop is four-day event, with more than 70 sessions covering tracks on DevOps, the cloud, networking, security, data and AI.

Among the key sessions is one led by Jayne Groll titled 'The Hybrid DevOps Product Team: A New Approach for a New Normal.' Pulling data from a recent global research project, Groll will be providing tangible, data-driven suggestions for what DevOps teams can and should be doing to improve outcomes.

Cloud is a particularly active track at Interop Digital. Robert LaMagna-Reiter, chief information security officer at FNTS (First National Technology Solutions), is running a session on how organizations can extend a zero trust security model to the cloud. In his session, he'll be giving attendees an overview of the real-world challenges and benefits of the zero trust model that goes beyond simple usernames and passwords to validate and secure user access. Josh Stella, co-founder and CTO at Fugue also will be speaking about cloud security in a session about cloud misconfigurations; he will explain how common cloud misconfiguration can be corrected to help improve cloud security.

Optimizing the cloud is a topic that Amélie Koran  will delve into during a session where she'll outline how visibility into cloud operations can help organizations improve cloud usage. Koran will demonstrate how having visibility and transparency into cloud operations can optimize the cloud for both operations and cost.

A key topic for many organizations moving to the cloud is how to bring along legacy applications. That's what Bill Schneider, senior principal engineer at Optum, will be talking about in an Interop Digital 2020 session where he will detail how his organization took a legacy business intelligence application and migrated it to AWS. The migration wasn't a straight lift-and-shift and involved creating an architecture that makes the most of cloud, including using serverless functions to help power back-end processes.