Session titles and descriptions, click on "Back to voting" to get back to the voting box for that particular session.

Cloud

1. Anthos in Production: Real World Deployments

Anthos unlocks locality, enables interoperability, and meets customers where they are. This presentation will review three successful implementations, including architecture, operational experiences, and benefits of Anthos in production.
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2. Automating disk and memory evidence collection in AWS

During an incident, answers are needed quickly. Often this starts with evidence collection
and log correlation. While companies generally have runbooks and standard operating procedures,
this process tends to be manual, time consuming, and prone to human error. Companies have
successfully automated on-prem evidence collection using both open-source and enterprise tools, but
few have tackled this task in the cloud.

At Goldman Sachs, we have automated an event-driven cloud response platform that uses AWS native
services to successfully collect disk and memory from potentially compromised EC2 instances. All
actions are logged via CloudTrail or custom host-based logs, ensuring that Chain-of-Custody and
evidence handling best practices are followed. The disk collection process is leveraged across three
AWS organizations and used by over 3000 AWS accounts, while the memory collection process is
nearing the final stages of approval to be rolled out firm-wide.
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3. Hacking the Cloud: Simulating Advanced Cloud Misconfiguration Exploits

The cloud changed the way hackers operate: Rather than targeting an organization and then searching for vulnerabilities to exploit, they now use automation to scan the internet looking for cloud misconfigurations to exploit, and then use IAM like a network to move laterally, find data, and extract it. We’ve graduated from simple misconfiguration mistakes to techniques bad actors are using today to breach data out from under the most advanced cloud security teams⁠—often without detection. 

We'll walk through a live demonstration of how hackers take advantage of common⁠ but overlooked cloud misconfigurations to gain access to environments, jump from account to account, discover resources to target, and exfil sensitive data. 

This session will be performed live in the terminal and the AWS console.
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4. How is IOT enabling the mobility and last-mile deliveries

IoT’s ability to connect smarter homes and cities has improved the quality of life for individuals. Beyond ubiquity, resilience, and other main features of IoT, there is also an accelerated tendency towards mobility either being transported by humans or by another carrier. The technology exists to deliver drones with IoT capabilities today. The ultimate goal is for the combined technologies to deliver near real-time analytics. Drones have rapidly expanded their capabilities beyond military surveillance applications and are being used in end number of businesses. Samar will talk about how the Internet of Things has fueled explosive growth in drone delivery business and how drones can provide speedy delivery and circumvent road infrastructure of ever-crowded cities of the world.

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5. Supporting Hybrid IT With Cloud-Based ITSM

Most businesses still run their most critical workloads on legacy, on-premise infrastructure, yet nearly all IT leaders understand the need to modernize and shift infrastructure to the cloud for greater scalability and agility. According to IBM, 98% of companies plan to use hybrid cloud computing by 2021. 

Hybrid IT is appealing because of its potential for cost-savings and flexibility, but it also brings a dynamic set of challenges for IT teams. IT pros are required to manage a multitude of on-premises and cloud-based systems and applications. 

A cloud-based IT service desk can be a connecting point between security, network management, application development, and internal support, yet many IT leaders don’t realize they can leverage ITSM technology to better manage hybrid IT environments. A single-view platform empowers IT professionals to reduce complexity and can enable automation that speeds up the discovery of environment dependencies, create actionable alerts, and lower overhead management.
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6. Cloud Networking, how cloud services and networking can make your life in IT easier.

Define "cloud"? Depending on how long you have been in IT and the Network Infrastructure field especially, you may have various opinions on that.

All in all, a lot of services are moving to cloud based or cloud like. Some add extra challenges if you are not prepared for them, some add more complications. More often than not, once implemented successfully, you can actually have much more control over a large portion or all of your network infrastructure from anywhere in the globe. You can manage, block access, diagnose issues all while on the go.

This approach makes it easier to be much more dynamic and more flexible in your role, able to adjust and scale as needed depending on the business you work for and how they can also adjust more seamlessly to changes with minimal fuss. This session discusses options and solutions to cloud network infrastructure.
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7. A Connected Data Paradigm for Security in the Cloud

Resistance to moving all data and applications to the cloud are no longer about pricing, performance, or capacity. It’s about security. Who is the ultimate caretaker of data, applications, and servers in a world with “connected data?” Should the cloud provider ensure every facet of security or should the customer be responsible for proper configuration and maintenance, while effectively just renting space from a cloud services company? With questions of cloud vulnerability swirling with regards to its complex configuration, automated environments, and drawbacks of traditional encryption, many believe that cloud security should logically be a shared responsibility. If so, what is the optimum percentage of responsibility each side should bear? In this session we will appraise the intricacies of cloud security responsibility, and offer ideas to take a sensible approach which helps everybody protect themselves from both malicious attackers and the cloud providers alike.
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8. Microsoft Azure Networking Deep Dive

This session gives you hands-on experience with Azure software-defined networking components. By the end of this session you'll know how to deploy and configure virtual networks, Azure Firewall, network security groups, route tables, network virtual appliances, and more.
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9. Standardize Your Microsoft Cloud Deployments with Azure Blueprints

Azure Blueprints contain Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, role-based access control (RBAC) assignments, and Azure Policy to give your team a "one-stop shop" for designing, deploying, and maintaining environments in Microsoft Azure. Attend this session to quickly get up to speed on Azure Blueprints, and take full control of your cloud infrastructure!
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10. Extend Microsoft Azure to Your Data Center with Azure Arc

"One cloud to rule them all" Azure Arc enables you to use Microsoft Azure management technologies like Policy, role-based access control, and taxonomic tags to manage servers in your local data centers and also other clouds like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. By the end of this session you'll understand how Azure Arc works, and will be able to on-board your own servers into Arc for management.
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11. Preventing VoIP Outages and Dropped Calls with AI

I have patented the world's first truly geo-distributed VoIP mesh system, where phones and phone call sessions are simultaneously connected to multiple data centers for real-time failover. Additionally, our platform has the ability to monitor phone call quality in real-time, and make adjustments to maximize quality and up-time without users knowing. The patent was granted about a week ago, and the technology has been in full production (and profitable) for over 3 years now. I founded my company about 5 years ago, when I was 20 and still in college at UTD.
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Infrastructure

12. Stories from the trenches - Migrating a Monolith to Kubernetes

Everyone has heard about Kubernetes and many are thinking of migrating, but without experience, it can be a daunting task.  You have a lot to gain from moving to Kubernetes.  Things that range from increased developer productivity to cost savings to improved uptime and availability.  Let's stop considering migrating and instead lay down a framework on how to successfully migrate legacy systems to Kubernetes.  

We will take into consideration both development and operational concerns.  We will leverage experience from two different companies migrations to Kubernetes on very different software stacks.  Initially, you will learn to take the lay of the land and understand different strategies that can be employed for the migration.  We will focus on pitfalls to consider and how we can make the migration as painless for all involved.
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13. Office 365 has a lot more to offer than just file hosting and email

Office 365 comes with tons of tools that most do not even explore. Taking the time to look at these and understanding your company can help use these tools to the fullest.
1. Do you know your company?
2. How to apply office 365 to your company using the apps and tools available
3. Thinking like the user
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14. Meraki - The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

Review why Meraki products are awesome, review some example of what hiccups I've run into, and review real world negatives of Meraki products.
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15. Old Dog, New Tricks! Best Practices for Getting the Most out of Microsoft DirectAccess

Microsoft DirectAccess has been around for many years and is widely deployed as an enterprise remote access solution. DirectAccess is incredibly complex, and administrators face many challenges implementing and supporting this technology. In this session attendees will learn the latest tips, tricks, and best practices for optimizing DirectAccess, including little-known configuration options that can improve performance and reliability, and even add functionality previously thought impossible! Guidance for DirectAccess server maintenance and client connectivity troubleshooting will also be provided.
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16. Modern Mobility for a Cloud-Based World: Introducing Windows 10 Always On VPN

DirectAccess has been the remote access solution of choice for many years. However, the technology is beginning to show its age and lacks many important features and capabilities necessary for today's modern cloud-based world. To address these shortcomings, Microsoft recently introduced Windows 10 Always On VPN as its next generation enterprise mobility solution. It supports modern authentication and management and can be integrated with popular cloud services such as Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune. In this session attendees will learn how Always On VPN compares and contrasts with DirectAccess, how the management model differs, and what infrastructure requirements must be in place to take advantage of this new technology.
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17. Network Administration and Plumbing, Things you didn't think that go together in SMB

When the information department is asked to unclog a toilet, do you comply? Or do you innovate? Showing the trials and tribulations of IT in the SMB world and shining the light on those who work endlessly in these markets.
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18. Refresh Your Network to Make it Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

2020 is the start of a new decade, and a time of change.  We started the year with sunsetting Windows 7 and Server 2008.  There are Cloud options everywhere to host all the things.  Security threats are being turned up to 11, and your network equipment is nearing end-of-life, both for performance and support.  Is a fresh start due with the new decade?  And of course, your users still just want things to work and management wants you to spend less.  

Learn how to plan your network refresh from start to finish.  From convincing management to write the check to performing the install of the final piece of software.  Hear about pitfalls to avoid and tips to make your work easier!  Presented by a veteran of four refreshes and has helped others through their own!
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19. Managing Serverless Costs with Kubernetes

Serverless has been widely accepted as a mechanism to deploy and run software easily.  However, the cost of running production scale workloads on Serverless can be surprisingly high.  Wouldn't it be great if we could get the benefits of running workloads on serverless without the hassle of worrying about costs ?

Enter Knative, an open standard allowing you to run serverless workloads on your own Kubernetes clusters.  In this talk, we will walk through a real world example of how we used Google CloudFunctions (FaaS) at WP Engine to deploy a serverless data pipeline, and then transitioned that workload to using Cloud Run (built upon Knative) and Kubernetes to achieve the same results at a greatly reduced cost.  We will dive deep into how we achieved the cost savings, handle fault tolerance, concurrency and auto-scaling

Now our developers can focus on code instead of the plumbing of managing infrastructure, while delivering customer and business value quickly and easily.
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20. Build Robust Versatile Data Pipelines with Serverless

Serverless has been widely accepted as a mechanism to quickly build & deploy microservices. In this talk, I will show you how to use Serverless to build highly flexible, high throughput data pipelines. We will walk through a real-world examples of how we've used Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Cloud Run, a technology built upon the Knative open standard, to deploy data pipelines at WP Engine. We will dive deep into how we address fault tolerance, concurrency & auto-scaling while keeping an eye on costs.

The most important thing for modern services is delivering data quickly and accurately. As business processes get more complex, it can be difficult to get the right data to your service quickly and efficiently. Using Serverless, let's make it dead simple to deploy and adapt our data pipelines to ever-changing requirements.
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21. Terraform Your World with Infrastructure as Code

It's 3 am and the production environment was somehow deleted. Your team is panicking and trying to remember all of the services, accounts, load balancers, and databases that need to be deployed and you remember that you defined all of your infrastructure as code using Terraform. You apply the state file and your infrastructure is back online. You can sleep easy until the RCA the next morning with all of your infrastructure back online. How did you do that? your team asks. I'll tell you in the morning, you reply as you sign off slack, close the incident chat and try to get some rest.
 
Terraform is an Infrastructure-as-Code tool that allows us to define our infrastructure needs in a set of files that allow for us to easily deploy, update, or delete infrastructure. In this talk we will go over the basics of Terraform and spin up a simple production environment for hosting a web service. Attendees will leave with an understanding of the benefits of Infrastructure as Code, how Terraform can aid in this process, and an easy-to-implement method for building their own Infrastructure as Code.
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IT Security

22. Cybersecurity – Baking It in Place Like a Layer Cake!

The multilayered approach always works best when it comes to security, so treat your infrastructure like you would treat baking a cake. In this session, we’ll discuss how to whip up the most effective security — in multiple layers. With a healthy dash of technology and an equal amount of strategy, you can stack your defenses high against modern cybercriminals. And let’s not forget the frosting on top: Personalization and customization to your specific environment. Attend to learn the recipe!
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23. Do This, Not That! 5 Important Things Microsoft PKI Administrators Should Know

Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) is commonly deployed to provide strong authentication for devices and users in the enterprise. Installing and configuring AD CS is made simple with an intuitive deployment wizard. Simply following the prompts can result in a less-than-ideal deployment though. Also, the default settings do not implement common security and operational best practices. Further, additional related services are required to ensure optimum assurance, reliability, and performance for the PKI. In this session attendees will learn the 5 most important things about building and operating a secure and robust certificate services infrastructure.
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24. How Hacks Happen (and how to avoid becoming a victim)

Hackers want to rip you off. Passwords. Credit card numbers. Social security numbers. Anything they can steal and sell is attractive and valuable. You must protect yourself. In How Hacks Happen, you learn what fake websites and phishing attacks look like. You learn how to protect yourself from becoming a victim. You learn how to keep security top of mind. How Hacks Happen requires audience interaction and includes a quiz. Let someone else become a victim. You are too smart for the hackers’ traps.
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25. K-12 Infosec strategies and compliance

HB-3834 requires K-12 school districts as well as state and local governments to conduct Information Security Awareness training for all staff members.  Canyon ISD was the first K-12 organization to acquire a DIR certification for its program.  Not only do we share that program at NO cost to all organizations, but we are happy to provide strategies for creating your own training program.  Currently, over 25 organizations are using our program rather than one of the paid alternatives.  We will demo our program, talk about challenges, explain how we conduct the required phishing test using the open-source GoPhish, and address compliance around SB-820 as well.
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26. Getting your users to give a crap about cyber security

Writing down passwords, clicking on every link that comes through email...getting our users to give a crap about cyber security is an ongoing challenge. How can we keep our networks and data safe if Bill in accounting uses the same password for every single account he creates?

I've been training my users on cyber security for over five years and recently discovered that if you make the training more personal, show them how best practices can keep their personal identities safe, most users will accept them with open arms and apply them at home and at work. In this session we'll talk about the best ways to get your users attention, make them care about cyber security, then teach them the ways to protect themselves and thus their employer.
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27. Practical Hacking - How I would hack your SMB and what you can do about it

There's a large knowledge gap between the "one man IT shop" and what attackers know they can actually do on your network. I spent a decade working in small IT departments doing the best that I could. I didn't have to work in InfoSec long to realize just how easy it was to get around any protection I thought I had in place. 
This presentation aims to showcase what happens when you forget the basics. In my live demos, I'll show you what I would do if I was attacking your network and exactly what you can do to stop me before I can even get started.
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28. Are you down with data security - Yeah, you know me!

In today's ever changing environment, data does not reside in one place and is being accessed by everyone.  Internal, external (contractors, 3rd parties), and remote employees. We will talk about security tools and techniques to help protect your data.
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29. The Insecurity of Email and What We Can Do About It

Email can do everything - but that doesn't mean that it should. Evidence and experience show that it is insecure, both in the "hacking and phishing" sense of the word and the "not great for organizational stability" sense of the word. A system that was designed to send local text-only messages is now creaking under the weight of its duties as document storage, identity provider, and approval manager, just to name a few. After reviewing the pain points of email, two pathways for improvement are discussed. First, systems and software that are suitable to replace or augment common email use cases are identified. Second, best practices for continuing usage and administration of email are discussed.
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30. Pay me the ransom or I leak all your data on the internet!

Ransomware is back with a vengeance, impacting organizations all around the globe. While it appeared ransomware cases might be decreasing for a brief time, these incidents rose dramatically in 2019 and show no signs of slowing down. This increase in malicious activity has serious business ramifications from increasing downtime to causing revenue loss to damage to your brand and reputation. Being held hostage by ransomware is a scary event to deal with in your organization. It's important to understand the emerging trends in ransomware and about the recent highly targeted attack vectors and what can be done to prepare before an attack.
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31. Turning employees into security heroes through enterprise password managers

Today’s workforce is in a constant battle against cyber criminals - according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were over 4 billion records breached in 2019, with most  focused on enterprise and government. With the cost of these breaches continuing to rise, one of the few remaining tools that enterprise IT leaders have in their arsenal is knowledge. 
Enterprise security is only as strong as its employees and too many are unwittingly creating major gaps for attackers to exploit. For instance, 63% of employees have created at least one outside account, without informing IT - and a third of employees are reusing passwords. 
This session will demonstrate how an enterprise password manager can help IT leaders empower their technical and non-technical teams and deputize them into being active participants in their organization’s security practices as well as secure accounts outside of IT’s control.
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32. Security Simplified with IdentityServer4

In this talk, we learn about the security specifications that IdentityServer4 supports, such as OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect. We then cover some best practices for the various type of clients we use in technology solutions. We then learn how to implement and integrate with IdentityServer4 using common clients and API's.

#Intro

* What is OAuth 2.0?
* What is OpenID Connect?
* What is SSO (Single Sign-On & Single Sign-Off)?

#Review of best practices

* Authentication vs. Authorization
* Where do I get the users claims?
* How often should I check for updated Authorization claims?
* What authentication flow is right for my application?

#Demos

Live demonstration of IdentityServer4 providing Authentication for .NET Core 3.0 API. 
We will show how to configure a C# MVC client, an Azure Function, a console process, a JavaScript client, Xamrin Mobile App to access the API.
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33. Azure Security Tips for Demoware

As technologists, we have to often move fast and learn fast to get our jobs done. We search out content that gets us started. We confirm the basic functionality and look to move on to the next item. While blogs and Microsoft documentation is great it is ultimately demoware. Demoware is not production ready! In this talk, we cover how to improve the security for common Azure resources.

I will review a typical demoware website application that uses Azure SQL. I will show the components and functionality of the solution.
Then I will secure the solution with an overview of the security recommendations.

#Azure RBAC

* How this impacts Azure Resource Group organization

#Security for IaaS

* Azure Virtual Machines
* VNET's
* Azure Storage

#Security for PaaS

* Azure SQL
* Azure Web Apps

#Security for FaaS 

* Azure Functions
* Azure Logic Apps
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34. Introduction to OWASP

This session will introduce, walk-through and leave you prepared to engage with the internet's best defense against hacking! I will familiarize you with OWASP and where they came from, what they do and where they are going. We will step through some challenges in the Juice Shop demo they have, familiarizing everyone with the project. I will also show off some other work by OWASP that is leading the way in defense against hackers.
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35. Doing the IoT penetration testing, the RIGHT way!

As IoT becomes more integral to our lives, the need to secure them grows. One thing the security industry isn't talking about very often is - IoT security. We talk very often about application security but very rarely we talk about security in Hardware or in particular security in IoT. With application security, you as a penetration tester is confronted with a Windows or a Linux server, or a web application or even a TCP/UDP protocols. But with IoT penetration testing, you have very uncommon architectures like ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, etc. Sometimes, you are even confronted with communication protocols like ZigBee, BLE, NFC, RFID, etc and to make it more complex, many times hardware device manufacturers do have their custom RF frequencies. These require new expertise and several toolsets which are very uncommon. It is no wonder that traditional penetration testers can get completely lost in the world of embedded devices security and their protocols. This talk is going to be a helpful resource to help you become an IoT Penetration tester.
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36. IoT developer's guide to building Secure IoT devices

Every year, there is an exponential increase in the number of IoT devices. The rise in the Internet of Things promises exciting and endless possibilities for businesses, organizations, and individuals, but as IoT becomes the most integral part of our lives, the need to secure them grows. In the past, insecure IoT devices have created a number of risks associated with information security. When everything is connected to everything else, the possibilities that these devices carry are unlimited, but at the same time, this carries a much wider risk and also creates a much larger attack surface. In the past, we have rarely seen IoT developers thinking about security. We need to teach our developers to think about IoT security upfront and include security in their development cycle. This is because it is very important to retain the customer's trust if you want to stay in this game for long. Over the past few years, we have seen IoT developers asking themselves, How can I secure my device, How can I secure my device against multiple security threats and after all, how do I secure my IoT devices without increasing the complexity? This talk aims to answer these questions to the developers.
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37. Spiceworks Capture the Flag

I plan to use this session to help inform IT professionals about different Cyber Security topics in an unconventional method. By guiding them through hands on exploitation in a secure method, the IT professional should begin to develop a security minded way of thinking. This will kick off a several day gamified security learning competition.
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Policies, Procedures, and Best Practices

38. A Beginner's Guide to getting the most out of any SpiceWorld

Places to go, stuff to learn: get some great information from someone who's been to most SpiceWorlds that will help you make every SpiceWorld a fun and worthwhile experience.
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39. One-Person Shop Needs Help & Funding

In a lot of business's you have a single person running everything from cell phones to servers. Along with the hardware and software you have user errors and a myriad of other items to take care off. Things that can help are better equipment and another employee.

Most business with single person IT do not have the funds for another employee or the best equipment, at least on the surface. In this session I would like to cover what can be done to help reduce the hardware issues and get better funding and possibly some help.
Outline:
1. Research
2. Creating your plan for help and funds
3. Presenting your plan
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40. Job Trailer or Mobile office woes and ways to over come them

Job Trailer or Mobile Field offices are often tough to work with when it comes to infrastructure, connectivity, and problem solving. Being these locations are temporary posses even more unique challenges.
1. Hardware has a higher fail rate due to conditions of the mobile office.
2. Trouble shooting equipment is difficult as it is remote.
3. Moving the equipment from job to job takes time and money.
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41. Changes to Compliance for 911 Have Arrived, What to Know

Kari's Law and Section 506 of Ray Baum's Act mean some significant changes to how you have to handle calls to 911 within your business. This session will go over the changes and what you need to know to bring your company into compliance.

Kari's law went into effect in February of this year and deals with how your employees dial 911.
While Section 506 of Ray Baum's Act goes into effect next February, it is more complicated and specifies who has to be able to dial 911, who has to be notified, and how detailed of a location needs to be sent to 911.
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42. Best Practices for Nonprofit and SMB IT Infrastructures

IT professionals in nonprofit and SMB companies often face the challenge of deploying and protecting fully equipped IT environments with tight budgets and smaller teams (in some cases, even as a 1-person-show). This session will cover some best practices and specific examples of solutions and tools that IT professionals can use to deploy a winning IT infrastructure and strategy. The topics covered will include servers, networking, storage, and a few tips and tricks from Windows Server 2016. There will also be an open discussion and Q&A time in the second half of the session.
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43. Working Hard to be Lazy - Ideas on maximizing value to you and your org

Often times, we who work in Small Business IT get embroiled in the day to day problems and messes of our roles, making it difficult to do more than just get through each day. Getting out of the continuous cycle of firefighting often seems impossible, but fear not! This session is tailored with your situation and many similar ones in mind, with some ideas and suggestions to help take the situation from working hard and seeming to be getting nowhere, to becoming much more relaxed and maybe even a bit lazy by developing your environment into a much simpler, easier, and more manageable situation.
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44. SPF DKIM and DMARC; What are They and How to Implement

Let's decipher the alphabet soup of email security option. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all help play a role in ensuring your email is delivered and not spoofed. Come learn what they are, how to set them up, and how it can help your company.
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45. A 2020 view on Operational Data Quality

Consideration of the key characteristics of a contemporary operational data quality program. The kinds of key facets that you should look for in any ODQ program in terms of organizational setup, data policy and governance, tools and techniques.
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46. Making your IT Training relevant & fun!

Everyone has attended training sessions that made them sleepy, watch the clock or simply space out. Whether the session was boring or presented poorly training didn't actually occur. Have you delivered training to a room full of those who are sleepy, watching the clock or simply spacing out? This session will show you how to liven up your sessions with humor and tried & true training  methods. End users need IT training. You need them to get the message. They want to go home. Learn how to present to their level in a way that catches their attention & doesn't let go.
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47. Use Cases :: Improving Feature Request Success

Which of the following feature requests will get more traction?
Request 1: Admin sends email with the following. "My boss says your app needs more oomph. If you don't add it, he won't renew your contract."
Request 2: Admin portrays 2 perspectives of the app: 1 as it is now and 1 with more oomph. Then the admin states his case for change. "By adding more oomph, end-user productivity will increase. As a result, I predict that my boss will eagerly renew our contract with you, as will other bosses. More oomph might, even, become a key selling point on your marketing site and in your sales campaigns.

If you like Request 1, stop reading now.

If you like Request 2, note that I simplified the example to fit this space. This is a 3-step process that I can explain in more detail.
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48. This Is The Way: Be the Tech Baby Yoda Knows You Can Be

Day to day IT work has many paths leading to the dark side of the Force. Skimping on tasks such as documentation, cable management and customer service does not just affect your work. For those techs that come behind you, that laziness leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. 

Come join an open discussion on the temptations of the dark side and how to keep future techs in your organization from hunting you down on the fiery plains of Mustafar with light sabers in hand. Caution: This session will contain an excessive amount of Baby Yoda memes.
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49. The Future Of Work Is Here -- Is Your IT Ready?

Greater work mobility, driven by connected devices, allows more people to complete tasks remotely than ever before -- but not without risk. 
  
Bob Burnett, Director of B2B Product Planning for Brother International Corporation, will utilize his decades of experience to highlight the challenges most businesses will encounter with mobile work styles, along with best practices. 
 
Ensuring your mobile workforce is secure requires a two-pronged approach. The first is organization-wide device awareness -- from making sure IT administrators are staying current with the firmware and implementing software updates, to proactively doing industry research about the latest threats. 
 
The second is employee awareness. Every employee needs to be attuned to potential risks. After all, many security issues are actually caused by accident, so teaching the members of your organization how to be responsible with their devices is a must. 
 
The Future of Work is coming. Is your business prepared?
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50. Women in IT Fireside Chat

While progress has been made on getting more women into IT, it is still largely a boy's club. This session will discuss the biggest challenges to women and non-binary folks in the field, and how best to address them.
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51. Solutions-Based Security Policy v. Needs-Based Policy: The Same or Are They Even Close?

IT managers hoping to create consistent security policy often find themselves in an adaptation loop; stuck minding the gap between theoretically sound policy and the technical limitations of their solutions. Are entities basing their critical security decisions on their actual needs or merely on the functions available within their budget? Security leaders hoping to craft policy must take a 360 viewpoint, carefully balancing the needs of the buyer looking to protect its assets, the assets being protected, and the capabilities of those interacting with those assets. How can data security managers best match technical and operational controls to their management vision? We will discuss the dynamic interplay between needs-based and solutions-based security policy, sharing real-world successes and failures, and outlining possible solutions to best reconcile the inherent disconnect between ever evolving technology and the human factor.
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52. You know what they say about assumptions...

Assumptions underpin all the projects we undertake. We can't possibly know everything about all the domains involved at all times, so we use experience (ours or others) to fill in the gaps and get things done. Without assumptions, no software would ever ship, only to be caught in an endless cycle of requirements gathering and indecision; but with assumptions comes risk. Through the lens of exploring high profile mistakes caused by identifiable assumptions, we can gain a little of that necessary experience to make better assumptions for our work. I'll also introduce a Carnegie Mellon "technical note" paper on a system for identifying assumptions that can lead to decreased risk, fewer bugs, and better tested software.
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53.  Agile Metrics to Turbo Charge Service Delivery and Customer Satisfaction

This case study seeks to demonstrate the top three service delivery metrics that will significantly reduce overall response time, resolution time, and issue backlog. It will show the path and results of a company that adopted specific metrics from the Agile methodology. Metrics that were previously predominantly utilized in software development, but that have now found an important place in Service Delivery.

Identifying the right metrics to focus on in order to resolve particular performance issues is a never ending and ever-changing quest. Too many service teams fail to establish metrics that actually drive performance improvement, customer satisfaction, and ROI.

With the adoption of some very specific Agile metrics, typically found in software development, your team can establish entirely new levels of response and resolution times. These will directly affect customer satisfaction on the client side and cost per issue on the service provider side, increasing the ROI for both.
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54.  Agile Service Delivery - The Ultimate Secret To Making Work Flow

Agile workflows can lead to a twofold increase in your team’s efficiency, cutting your backlog in half.

Agile and its Pull workflows replace the old “Stack and Run” methods dictated by many ticketing systems. Agile allows us to manage the work, not the people. It forces us to limit Work in Progress, the single biggest time thief in an efficient service delivery system. And Agile helps us immediately identify and focus on the bottlenecks and slowdowns that would normally drag down the entire system.

Agile Service Delivery methods allow your entire team to function with a level of autonomy far superior to those still preached by the industry and ticketing system solution providers. They can be used to significant advantage, regardless of the service ticket system in place or the team size, with greater ROI for you and greater value to your clients.
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55.  How a one person IT shop in a school navigated the Corona virus

In March of 2020, the school I work for was forced to go into distance learning. Through the creation of some policies, and some prep work in the week preceding the closure, The admin team and I managed to create an environment where everyone involved (teachers, parents and students) were reasonable happy.
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Scripting and Automation 

56. Reluctant Powershell coder, automate coding for troubleshooting and management tasks

Over the past two decades I have worked in IT in various roles from basic Helpdesk to network/systems administration. In most of these roles I have used some form of automation/scripting to manage some of the day to day tasks.

There are many different tools and toolsets out there available, one that has come into its own in the past decade and a half is Powershell. There are many basic commands that are overlooked day to day and once combined with Powershell can make your life a lot easier. This is a discussion on how you can not only use Powershell, but combine it with many other tools to automate anything from basic PC cleanup, logging and diagnosis to making changes in Active Directory with a simple selection of code. All of this gives you more time for other tasks and eases the day to day grind!
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57. Windows Logging, IR, Dynamic analysis and the kitchen sink!

I would like to speak about my experience in the areas of Incident response with a focus on what responders see regularly and how companies can improve not only their security posture, but also how they can increase the odds of recovering quickly from an incident. there are so many things that can be done (for FREE!) that can really improve the ability for Incident Responders to be able to investigate breaches, malware infections and other malicious cyber acts.
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58. Using tmux and Vim as an IDE

In a world where none of the modern day tools exist, what would you do with just a command line? I will show how to use tmux and Vim to navigate your new world and the power that these two can bring to the table.
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59. Azure PowerShell Evolution: Get Comfortable with the Az Commands

Azure PowerShell has evolved a great deal over the past few years. We have the Azure, AzureRM, and Az modules--which to use, when? Attend this beginner-level tutorial to get a firm grasp on where Microsoft is headed with Azure PowerShell. Limit your code refactoring and improve your proficiency with the technology.
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60. Git and GitHub: Newbie to Intermediate Contributor in 45 Minutes

Congratulations on learning PowerShell! Your next order of business is to learn Git and GitHub so you can work collaboratively and track all code revision history. In this "lightning" session, you will get (Git?) immediately productive with using Git and GitHub to store your PowerShell source code. After you leave the session, you will know how to fork a GitHub repository, clone it to your computer, commit changes, and submit pull requests to origin. Welcome to DevOps!
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Soft Skills for IT Pros

61. Next Level - Going from Systems Administrator to IT Manager or Director

You have done your time in the trenches. You have maxed out your technical skills, you have built your relationships with vendors, and you're wondering how you go from the guy that fixes everything to the guy who manages the people that fix everything. I will go over my twenty plus year IT career path and provide guidance on how to make the transition. Common myths, making choices.
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62. Let’s Change How We Think About Change

As dealing with change becomes a regular business activity, leading change becomes a skill to develop and master. Adapting your business in today's world of “always on” transformation can actually be invigorating instead of exhausting. Join longtime conference speaker and former IBM consultant Glenn Anderson for this enlightening look at organizational transformation. Don't try to avoid the chaos, manage it by understanding the Satir Change Curve Model. Empathy and perspective are the keys to success!
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63. Yes, And: How Collaboration Increases Performance

Yes, And. Two words that form the foundation for the rules of performing good improvisational comedy. These same rules used in the world of IT can improve collaboration. Who knew? Along with his former career at IBM, conference speaker Glenn Anderson enjoyed a second life as an improvisational actor. Trained at Chicago's famous Players Workshop of Second City, Glenn spent many years performing improvisational comedy every week at a club in Chicago. Laugh and learn from Glenn, and let's apply "Yes And" thinking to your IT world.
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64. Mind-numbing vs Mind-blowing: How to Energize Your Presentation

Presentations are enjoyable and effective when the speaker shares their passion and energy with the audience. Standing in front of an audience with a projector and some PowerPoint, how exactly is that accomplished? As a speaker, you have power! Drawing on experiences speaking around the world as a former IBM instructor and conference presenter, along with improvisation and comedy club experience, Glenn Anderson will focus this session on the basics of developing and delivering technical material. Topics range from strong titles to proper amount of content to effective use of PowerPoint charts. Also covered will be your technique in front of the audience - body language, voice and movement, handling questions, using a microphone, and what happens when things go wrong. And something will go wrong! Bring your questions, experiences and ideas, and let's explore together the characteristics of a great presentation.
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65. Are You Still Confusing? 14 Tricks for Connecting and Communicating

Are you a confusing communicator? Do you feel like you are trying your best to communicate, but no one seems to understand you? Miscommunication and an absence of understanding can result in problems large and small. In session, learn to connect and communicate more effectively. 
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66. IT Gemba Walk - The benefits of seeing

IT professionals depend on monitoring systems and tickets to react to issues in their environment.  This sometimes isolated them and forces the IT team to only be visible when there are issues.

Walking out into the environment helps to get the IT Team notices and makes them more proactive and more involved in the business operations.

Issues are caught earlier, before they become problems and there are able to get first hand feedback from users who would not normally communicate with IT.

This makes for a more visible IT Department and a more inclusive environment in a successful business.

IT Gemba walks help bridge that gap.
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67. Influencing user behavior based on behavior science

Behavior science studies show that people can be influenced to perform in a desirable manner.  Looking at study information and using real world examples this session will show how other IT staff can positively influence user behaviors.  I have personally used these techniques to improve cyber security behaviors.  I plan to show examples of how using techniques found effective in behavior science studies have positively impacted end user performance.  While there are no perfect scores as a result there is sufficient evidence that scores on things like Phishing tests can be drastically improved.  Finding the right motivators can be the most difficult challenge, but a worthwhile venture to anyone seeking to improve end user behaviors.
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68. It's About the Relationship!

Whether the IT Industry cares to admit or not, it's about the relationship!  How well could we do our customers' jobs?  What if the tables were turned on us and we had to do their jobs?  From our technical experiences, how can we better help our customers do their jobs better through technology?  It's about people.  People are the ones who are serving other customers.  Whether it's a driver, an office manager or a parent.  We are people, not robots!  We relate, whether we realize it or not.  How we treat our customers will determine how well we measure our success.  There is nothing like being there in person!  Of course, there may be restrictions, such as distance, time, etc
However, if possible, showing up demonstrates that you have their attention.  When your customers know that you made the time to visit them, they will notice.
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69. End-Users...love'em or hate'em..we need them, but how to deal with them is the question

Positively interacting with end-users for a mutually beneficial IT experience.
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70. Giving Back to Your Profession

With the knowledge that all of you have acquired in your profession, whether it's desktop support, remote phone support, developing, cloud architecture, web design, service desk, call center, etc. etc., how many ways can you give back to your colleagues?

Are there people who are considering entering the area in which you have worked that you could tell them the positive and negative realities of what they are getting into?

Are there peers that you can share experiences with that can give you that AHA moment or could you help them with issues in which you have experienced?
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71. Voting 101

A discussion of how and why IT Professionals are looked upon to provide reliable information about voting in US elections.
We will cover specific aspects of the election process and clear up confusion about common political terms such as:
Gerrymandering
Party Delegates
Straight Party Ballots
Independent Analysis of Candidates
How to find reliable and truly objective assessments of specific office holders and candidates
Why voting is the most significant right of a US citizen
How to encourage participation without taking a specific position
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72. The Journey Continues - Breaking Career Constraints

Feeling stuck from a career standpoint?  Maybe it's a specific job, a specific career path, or perhaps a specific work environment.  There are many factors which influence the way we feel about our work.  If you’re someone who has felt this way or even considered that you might be stuck, what can you do to break out of a sticky situation?

What if there was prescriptive process to help identify, enable, and maintain the change you need to be in a better place?  What set of actions could you start taking today?  Regardless of your age or level of experience, if you are willing to take action, let’s talk about what could be and lay out a plan to get you there.
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73. The Future of Work + Play

This talk is to unveil and explain the relationship between hobbies and work and how they could improve individual productivity. It will also be an avenue to point out to managers, CTOs and founders the importance of allocating time and even financial support via subscription to their teams to get involved in these hobbies because at the end of the day it improves productivity and ROI - it shouldn't be classified as a waste of time and resources but as an important part of the company.
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74. Promoting Digital Wellbeing in a Tech Community

Techies are very hardworking people hence spend over 8 hours of their day sited and over 18 hours of their day with gadgets/devices. The harder they work the more prone they are to work hazards. Join me as we examine work hazards and how to strike a healthy balance between work and wellbeing.
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75. Hacking Your Emotional API

Imagine that your brain is wired to an API, and that one of the endpoints triggers you to be absolutely furious when it’s called. All the other emotions have endpoints as well. This is the metaphor that I use to describe how feelings work.

When we think about emotions this way, they become a bit less scary. The metaphor allows us to use technical language to describe experiences which are often misunderstood. 

To explain why it's important to improve our emotional responses I go over research which describes how improperly handling your emotions can have significant impacts things like abstract thinking, short-term memory and executive function. 

Then I present a toolbox full of techniques that you can use develop emotional fluency, and I illustrate a number of those techniques by describing my own emotional challenges as if they were written in code. I describe how I used those skills to "refactor" that code.

This topic is particularly relevant today, as the non-coding aspects of tech life are becoming more important than the coding ones. Thriving in a diverse community requires us to develop our skills in communication, understanding and empathy. I want to share what I've learned about emotions in a way developers can relate to, so they can grasp how feelings impact not only their own quality of work, but their ability to work well with others.
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76. How to Design Top-Tier Computer-Based Training

Have you considered recording computer-based training? Whether its for your employer, YouTube, or a computer-based training provider, you can learn from one of the best in the field. Attend this session to gain valuable tips, tricks, and strategies for designing, recording, and editing top-tier instructional content.
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77. Impostor syndrome in the IT world  from a conference speaker's perspective

Have you ever compared yourself with other team members and felt like a fraud? 
Have you ever felt unworthy of your job promotion? 
Have you ever doubted of your successes? 
Do you know someone who could have answered "Yes" to any of those questions? 

These are symptoms of Impostor Syndrome; it affects most of the people working in IT. It affects conference speakers as well. I will share with you my struggles public speaking and how I fight impostor syndrome on every conference. Hopefully this talk will help you to fight impostor syndrome on your day job and help others who might be suffering in your area of influence. 
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78. How to overcome your fears to become a conference speaker

Have you ever thought about speaking at a conference? 
Have you ever wondered how the speakers managed to get into the conference?

I am afraid of public speaking, I usually speak fast and I'm asthmatic. None of that stopped me to accomplish my dream of sharing knowledge and give to the community as much as I have gotten from the community.

I will share with you how I managed to speak at events across Europe and US, and how thanks to the advice from other speakers and mentors, I manage to overcome my fears and limitations. Hopefully you will leave the session wanting to share your knowledge with others!
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79. Soft Skills +Group Dynamics + Communication Skills = Productive Team Projects

Attendees will discover the influence of communications places into action while using your everyday people skills, added with a unique style of active listening.

This is ideal for individuals who have Teams working in the areas of Software Engineering, Programming and DevOps.The approach derives from my experience as an adjunct professor (psychology & group dynamics) and experience as an interrogator/profiler and hostage negotiator. My proficiency with said skills has allowed me to assemble a METHOD, which will INTEGRATE your PROJECTS, EMPLOYEES, and TEAM PROJECTS.

This RESEARCH and practice will assist companies, organizations, and groups by merging psychology in consort with Active Listening Skills (ALS), which will result in an ACCELERATED-advance technique, devised to build Team rapport as well as enhanced recruiting methods.

This presentation will allow businesses to use the TEAM PROJECT MODEL to help their team members cooperate with each other, with the focus on utilizing distinctive intensities within individual elements among members of a team.

This presentation will illustrate that the above model is acceptable. However, a team will not communicate effectively if a team that has been taken apart and separated due to disconnection and lack of communication.

By using ACTIVE LISTENING SKILLS (ALS), a method developed by the FBI, every team member will increase productivity regarding their specific missions, and when united, the team members will form successful finalization of their team-goal. By applying ALS, the team's entire task will be the result of a collective productive representation of their work.

As with all teams, each team was placed together because at the initial conception of the group; it was assumed that the team element is within the excellent working order. However, the appreciation of the team model must be well-oiled, and if not, members of the team will individually lack the proper function that is necessitated for TEAMWORK and fail to produce.
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80. See the People: How to Factor in Tech's Impact to Humans

Modern-day tech is solving more of our day-to-day problems. However, as we continue to move toward convergence, we are in the midst of a grand human experiment: how will this impact us and how we experience the world?
This is an engaging, high-energy presentation that provides real techniques that tech pros can use to evaluate how their solution will impact people.

Audience Takeaways:
* Hear case studies and examples of the unintended consequences of tech solutions, and how to avoid them.
* Learn the key questions you must ask of your solution in order to see beyond your own perspective.
* Discover simple but meaningful techniques you and your team can use to evaluate your solution's impact on people.
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81. Running a Successful Technology Department in the Non Profit World

Non Profits are limited with budget constraints and have to work with less. There are many free services and products that are available to Non Profits that many people may not know about.
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