ONUG Fall 2018 in New York City hosted by FedEx wrapped up after two days focused on presenting new thinking and models for cybersecurity and data protection as Digital Transformation building blocks for Global 2000 companies. ONUG Fall 2018 was the largest gathering ever with over 55 vendors engaged as the community focused on cybersecurity and protecting digital asset requirements for the digital age. Discussions on securing the digital enterprise spanned federal government, all top nine industry sectors, corporate security organizational design, skills and culture plus standards and open source communities, needed to drive fundamental and systemic change. A new relationship between public and private sectors was a top priority. This message was delivered by FedEx board member Chris Inglis, co-father of the internet Dr. Robert Kahn, and so many other prestigious and influential business, academic and research professionals. ONUG continues to lead as the voice of IT executives of the Global 2000 as they build and manage their secure digital enterprises.  

Proof of Concept Demonstrations and ONUG Academy Take Center Stage

ONUG Fall 2018 saw the largest number of Proof-of-Concept demonstrations with nearly 40 vendors presenting solutions that addressed the ONUG Working Group use case requirements. This was a major accomplishment and we saw incredible engagement from our vendor partners. See some of the videos online on the ONUG Vimeo Channel.

ONUG Academy was the largest educational and training program that ONUG has produced offering the greatest number of courses from Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Mist, Verizon, Arista and Red Hat. The courses were heavily attended by some of the largest IT organizations focused on programming infrastructure to drive the future IT operational teams.

A new Cybersecurity and Data Protection Framework

ONUG is facilitating an industry discussion to define a new cybersecurity framework to secure the digital economy. The conversations kicked off at ONUG Fall and will continue through our community through much of 2019 and onward. SecOps organizations will transform toward DevSecOps to deliver secure digital value from now into the future. The entire security industry supply chain is under review by the largest spenders of IT as the current ecosystem is unsustainable with security spending growth outpacing overall IT spending growth.

AI for IT

The ONUG Community committed itself to obtaining state data from all infrastructure products consumed in the large enterprise in a normalized format so that AI algorithms can be systemically applied to IT Operations. In five years, very few will be designing infrastructure as Agile process and DevOps best practices are applied to infrastructure build and run. The industry is now starting to operationalize automated infrastructure as code, be it in private or public clouds.

ONUG Use Case Voting Winners

The IT executive audience voted onsite and the top three use cases that emerged were as follows:

• Automated Cloud Network Provisioning
• SD-WAN 2.0
• Traditional Network Security Creates Vulnerabilities & Bottlenecks

To get engaged with the ONUG Working Groups as they kick off planning for 2019, please join here. All of these topics and more will be the focus of ONUG Working Groups in the year ahead.