Future-Proofing Infrastructure: What’s Next in Cloud, Edge & Networks

Raja Chris is a Director and Head of IT Infrastructure at Annaly Capital management, a diversified capital manager that invests in and finances residential and commercial assets with over $125 billion in their portfolio. At Annaly, Raja is responsible for the design and delivery of next generation products, cloud providers, services, technologies and IT functions critical to achieving Annaly’s strategic growth priorities. He provides leadership for the continued development of an innovative, robust, and secure information technology environment throughout the Company.

“The WSTA’s diverse membership puts it in a unique position to share knowledge with and educate technology professionals regarding current challenges, solutions, and future directions for the industry,” says Raja. “Being part of the WSTA has offered me the unique opportunity to provide members with an education and knowledge sharing platform designed to drive industry-wide changes in future technology, such as Blockchain, CICD, AI, RPA, and Cybersecurity, etc.”

Raja has spent over 20 years engineering solutions and overseeing technology teams in the financial services industry. He has guided global, matrix, and cross-functional teams in IT architecture design, development, and implementation for improved infrastructure stability, performance, and team productivity. His leadership approach is to partner with business leaders and his IT team to drive innovation and use technology as a strategic lever in achieving aggressive growth targets and his vision.

Before joining Annaly, Raja was Head of Engineering and Operations at Nomura Security and led implementation of strategic enterprise architecture methodologies and ensured all processes aligned with corporate technology roadmaps and best practices; established solid systems and policies to enforce architectural review and identified requirements based on company business goals. Prior to that, Raja held various senior roles at SAC Capital, and Citi Group. Raja is currently a WSTA Board Member and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. You can contact Raja via LinkedIn or email him directly at rchris@annaly.com

John Burke is CTO of Nemertes Research. He conducts and analyzes primary research in, and advises key enterprise and vendor clients on: AI, cloud, networking, infrastructure, and automation, cybersecurity focusing on Zero Trust and SASE/SSE. As a research analyst and consultant, he draws on his 30 years of experience as a practitioner and leader in IT to better understand the needs of IT executives and the challenges facing vendors trying to sell to them. His experience has given him broad and deep knowledge in computing, communications, and IT management. Mr. Burke holds an MA in the history of science and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, both from The Johns Hopkins University. His interests include baking, birding, and beer.

For most large companies, data centers are going to be around for many years to come. A significant portion of workloads are still running on premises, with some workloads even being repatriated from cloud to data center. There are also newer kinds of workloads, ranging from the IOT edge to private AI, that many enterprises either must or would prefer to run in on-premises infrastructure. 

So, the question of how to future-proof your data centers is not a trivial one.

Join us as we discuss the opportunities and perils of the job of future-proofing on-premises data centers! We’ll dig into 

• Compute, network, and storage technologies
• Data center infrastructure management
• Cloud infrastructure management 
• Traditional separate components vs. converged or hyperconverged infrastructure
• Edge data centers vs. centralized data centers
• Planning for security from the chip outwards: getting to a trusted computing base

Sasha Kipervarg is the Co-Founder & CEO of Ternary, a leading provider of cloud cost optimization software for large enterprises. Sasha is a Board Member of the FinOps Foundation and is passionate about uniting Finance and Engineering around a common understanding of cloud spend. Prior to founding Ternary, Sasha was the Head of Global Cloud Operations for LiveRamp, managing a successful large scale GCP cloud migration and FinOps practice, and before that, the Director of DevOps at Workday. He holds a BS degree from Northeastern University and a Stanford Executive MBA. Sasha lives in Pacifica, California where he perfects his pizzaiolo and modular synth skills.

Join us as we unravel the complexities of cloud spending in a clear, actionable manner. Discover why the rapid shift to DevOps and infrastructure APIs, plus the change in spending power from Finance to Engineering, is leading to unexpected cloud costs…and how FinOps serves as a solution framework, bringing together Finance, Engineering, and Procurement for improved spend optimization. You’ll learn how to make your cloud investments more efficient and effective! 

Key Takeaways: 

• Understand the impact of data center migrations, DevOps and the decentralization of spending on cloud budgets.
• Learn how the FinOps approach makes your cloud investments work smarter, not harder.
• Explore essential tools and capabilities your company needs to effectively master the cloud spending game.

Michael Rau has been with F5 since 2015. Prior to F5, Mike worked at Cisco for 20 years in a variety of different executive level capacities in Systems and Solutions Engineering, Technical Strategy, Product Development, and served as the Field CTO for Cisco’s Enterprise Networking and Security portfolio. At F5. He initially served as the VP of Global Sales Solution Engineering and later became the SVP of Solutions Engineering and Enablement. In this expanded capacity, Mike was responsible for F5’s Public Cloud Alliances and F5’s Technology partnerships. Mike has been actively involved as the sales lead in all M&A activities for F5. He took a leadership role in F5’s acquisition of NGINX and Shape which included due diligence as well as the integration into F5. This experience led Mike to move into the role of SVP of Corporate and Business Development. In this role, Mike helped develop the company strategy for entering the Edge market and that work led to his leading the acquisition of Volterra as a next generation Edge platform. Seeing the shift in the importance of SaaS and Managed Services for SP and Enterprise customers, Mike moved into his current role where he is responsible for F5’s Distributed Cloud Services portfolio. As the General Manager of the business, he is responsible for the product development and delivery of F5’s Distributed Cloud SaaS Service. F5 Distributed Cloud Services include Application Security, Multicloud Networking, Edge Computing, CDN, and DNS services.

Application delivery infrastructure is becoming more distributed. Modern applications need to be deployed across multiple clouds, edge locations, and on-prem locations, and the teams responsible for them need to deploy rapidly while also maintaining robust security and observability. Doing this across multiple tools and point solutions is a daunting challenge.

In this session, we’ll discuss:

• How you can have a single platform to seamlessly deploy and secure workloads with full layer 3 to layer 7 control and visibility across any environment. 
• How your network can be extended to create a distributed application environment, giving you the flexibility to deploy seamlessly applications to any on-premises or Cloud infrastructure you choose. So, as your IT footprint grows, you will always be ready to scale while keeping your network secure.

Joe Garvey is a Principal Architect at Nutanix. He advises key financial services clients on cloud, networking, infrastructure, automation, AI, and security. Drawing on his 20 years of experience in operations, engineering, and architecture, ranging from IBM to Microsoft, he helps IT executives design strategies and solutions to meet the demands of the business. Joe attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and earned a degree in management information systems.

A recent goal for many large organizations is to deliver a hybrid multicloud defined as: The uniform consumption and operation model of the edge, the datacenter (private or colocation), and the hyperscalers.  With that goal in mind, the lines of business are expecting resource and project delivery at the speed of the cloud, with the security and consistent performance of the datacenter. 

The path to a modern, future-proofed datacenter is by no means an easy or short one.  Join us as we discuss the concepts and milestones along your path to a future-proofed hybrid multicloud.  We will discuss 

• How to incorporate existing compliance and governance into a modern architecture
• What can we deliver today 
• What a desired end state may look like 
• How and when to extend your technologies to the edge and the cloud 
• How and when to incorporate additional parts of your datacenter as-a-service 
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service 
• Storage-as-a-Service 
• Platform-as-a-Service 
• Database-as-a Service

Amir Khan is a computer networking visionary who founded and led Viptela’s market-leading, cloud-first, (SD-WAN) business before its acquisition by Cisco. As prescient as he was in identifying the $8B opportunity for SD-WAN, Amir recognized that the network hampered the cloud journey. Amir and CTO Atif Khan founded Alkira in 2018 to reinvent networking for the cloud era. Before Viptela, Amir held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, and Nortel. He holds 4 patents.

Alkira CEO Amir Khan takes a case study approach to show how financial services companies are taking advantage of the networking resources available in the cloud to streamline their operations, while improving connectivity, security and scalability. The presentation will showcase a leading global financial services organization’s journey to simplify multi-cloud operations, implement effective network segmentation and integrate
advanced security and analytics services. Attendees will gain insights into the real-world challenges, applications and benefits of cloud networking in the financial sector.

Key Takeaways:
● Understanding the nuances of cloud networking in financial services.
● Strategies for simplifying and securing multi-cloud environments.
● Real-world challenges and benefits of implementing advanced cloud networking
solutions.

What technologies should financial services firms be deploying first, second, and third as they refresh their infrastructure to support emerging applications? This panel session brings together experts from financial firms and the vendor community to discuss how best to architect, engineer, and manage next-generation infrastructure.

John Burke is CTO with Nemertes Research. He conducts and analyzes primary research in, and advises key enterprise and vendor clients on, hybrid cloud, software-defined networking including SD-WAN, automation, and DevOps. As a research analyst and consultant, he draws on his 30 years of experience as a practitioner and leader in IT to better understand the needs of IT executives and the challenges facing vendors trying to sell to them. His experience has given him broad and deep knowledge in computing, communications, and IT management. Mr. Burke holds an MA in the history of science and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, both from The Johns Hopkins University. His interests include baking, birding, and beer

Raja Chris is a Director and Head of IT Infrastructure at Annaly Capital management, a diversified capital manager that invests in and finances residential and commercial assets with over $125 billion in their portfolio. At Annaly, Raja is responsible for the design and delivery of next generation products, cloud providers, services, technologies and IT functions critical to achieving Annaly’s strategic growth priorities. He provides leadership for the continued development of an innovative, robust, and secure information technology environment throughout the Company.

“The WSTA’s diverse membership puts it in a unique position to share knowledge with and educate technology professionals regarding current challenges, solutions, and future directions for the industry,” says Raja. “Being part of the WSTA has offered me the unique opportunity to provide members with an education and knowledge sharing platform designed to drive industry-wide changes in future technology, such as Blockchain, CICD, AI, RPA, and Cybersecurity, etc.”

Raja has spent over 20 years engineering solutions and overseeing technology teams in the financial services industry. He has guided global, matrix, and cross-functional teams in IT architecture design, development, and implementation for improved infrastructure stability, performance, and team productivity. His leadership approach is to partner with business leaders and his IT team to drive innovation and use technology as a strategic lever in achieving aggressive growth targets and his vision.

Before joining Annaly, Raja was Head of Engineering and Operations at Nomura Security and led implementation of strategic enterprise architecture methodologies and ensured all processes aligned with corporate technology roadmaps and best practices; established solid systems and policies to enforce architectural review and identified requirements based on company business goals. Prior to that, Raja held various senior roles at SAC Capital, and Citi Group. Raja is currently a WSTA Board Member and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. You can contact Raja via LinkedIn or email him directly at rchris@annaly.com

Guruprasad Ramamoorthy is the Global Head of Network Architecture, Engineering & Operations at S&P Global. He has been with the company since 2017 and is a hands-on technology executive with a unique blend of Product Development, Digital Infrastructure, End User Computing and Cybersecurity experience.

Guruprasad is responsible for plan-build-run functions of the global network that spans across 80+ offices, 10+ on-premises Data Centers and 4+ multi-cloud environments. He also leads various enterprise-wide initiatives to rapidly transform S&P Global’s core infrastructure to software-defined, re-imagine the edge infrastructure and strengthen the cybersecurity.

Guruprasad represents the company’s commitment to develop talent to deliver new insights, accelerate the speed of operations and value delivery for customers while establishing S&P Global as the most innovative company. To achieve this, he works closely with the global leaders to enable S&P Global’s product and systems with the help of 1000 + technology associates.

In his previous role, Mr. Guruprasad was responsible for building S&P Global’s Technology center of excellence in India from ground-up while attracting the best talent in the region. The site in India was purpose-built to facilitate innovation by providing employees with access to latest technologies and infrastructure, as well as physical spaces that enable highly collaborative teams.

Guruprasad has about 18 years of experience. He was previously associated with companies such as Visa, BNY Mellon and Sify Technologies. He has a Master’s in Business Administration and Bachelor’s in Information Technology.