by Last Friday I had the privilege of attending the exclusive, and first ever Define Tomorrow Huddle, hosted at the amazing Aerospace Bristol (home of the historic last flight Concorde) by the fantastic team at Computer World Group. The Huddle featured demos from three brilliant sponsors, including Rubrik, Bitdefender and Zerto, all of whom gave a true deep dive of fantastic technologies and solutions.
First up, Mark Shaw (SE Manager Western Europe) and Ed Morgan (SE Western Europe) gave a fantastic overview of Rubrik and their thoughts around the main IT trends for 2018 (that of multi-cloud mobility, how to improve security therein, compliance via policy driven automation, and cost management); a brilliant demo of both the current flagship backup/restore solution, as well as the very exciting and upcoming Polaris SaaS platform, the latter which will see the introduction of a true ‘Unified System of Record’, bringing together all business apps and data, from across multiple clouds, into one common platform. Truly exciting stuff, and something to keep tuned to for future announcements.
What sets Rubrik aside from the more traditional backup and restore products is their SLA-based platform; essentially, allowing administrators to ‘configure and forget’. Automation of said backups is highly adaptive via their REST API driven solution. A great looking solution and one certainly worth exploring.
Up second was Bitdefender‘s Liam Puelo. Now this is a great looking product. Not only do Bitdefender offer layered, next-gen endpoint security for laptops and workstations, mobile devices, physical servers, software defined instances, and virtual desktops (with upcoming support for hypervisor protection), but they also provide centralised BitLocker management and reporting, VMware NSX integration via NSX’s Guest Introspection, and third party patch management for 95 vendors. Truly awesome stuff!
Last (but by no means least) was Steve Blow, Senior Solution Engineer at Zerto, detailing protection, recovery, replication, DR automation and validation for mission-critical workloads. Of course, hardcore VMware fans will be well versed in Site Recovery Manager, however, as architects we need to be aware of all offerings and alternatives, and Zerto has turned some heads in the last few years. Again, their change from the ‘norm’ is quite refreshing, and their protection of VMs via Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs), as well as the compliancy testing (think GDPR, PCI, ISO, SOX, etc.), is quite refreshing.
As always, an amazing event thanks to the guys at Computer World. These events really are exclusive and bring together technical professionals from throughout the UK. If you’re interested in attending a future event, get in touch with the CW team (as soon as you can!) via the Computer World Define Tomorrow Huddle page. Thanks again guys, and I’ll look forward to catching up with you soon!
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