Abstracts

 

Day 1 - Tuesday 11th October

Cyber Security in Practice - Learning with Lego
Dr Rebecca Robinson, Business Support and Project Manager for the Cyber Foundry programme, Lancaster University

Based on real life security incidents and the latest research, this role play-based game puts your team in the driving of security decision making and pits you against other teams. The aim: to generate the most income for your business whilst defending it from the impending cyber security attacks.

This interactive educational game is designed to teach the principles and value of quantitative IT security risk calculation.

 

An Evergreen & sustainable approach to delivering storage services
Mike Roan, Solution Engineer Director UK & I, Pure Storage

Hear from Mike Roan on how Pure’s Evergreen subscription models are designed to minimize e-waste, extend the service lifetimes of equipment, and reduce storage underutilisation. Due in part to these programs, 97% of Pure flash storage arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. Mike will talk about Pure's own published ESG report which also contains a product life cycle assessment of its portfolio, specifically its FlashArray products. The assessment found that the Pure’s existing customers have been achieving up to 80% reduction in “direct carbon usage by data systems compared to competitive products.”

 

Next generation, sustainable cybersecurity for survivability in high-risk sectors
Chris Parker MBE, Director of Government, Fortinet

For over 20 years, Fortinet has combined innovation with environmental sustainability to develop products that use less energy at customer sites. By creating the industry's only security-focused processors, Fortinet has been able to integrate multiple security and networking functions into a single, highly energy-efficient platform, lowering the environmental impact of networks, including data centres which consume around 2% of global energy. Fortinet produces the world’s most energy-efficient security appliances, that consume as much as 3X fewer resources than traditional appliances while delivering up to 15X more performance. Leading edge technology with environmental benefits, offering excellent incident readiness and survivability.

 

Digital Sustainability - exploring how you can make a difference
Henrik Brogger, Director of Digital Operations and Service Delivery, University of Reading

Want to understand more about sustainability in the digital context? Find out digital sustainability means and why it is important to us? Join me for an informative session exploring the sustainability imperative and the digital imperative, which together provide impetus for us to act now. Learn about the challenges we face regarding digital sustainability and, finally, hear suggestions for what you can do to become more digitally sustainable.

 

Panel discussion: ‘Surviving the journey to the public cloud’
Mehmet Batmaz, Head of Infrastructure, Greenwich University, Dave Thornley, Head of Digital Architecture, Sheffield Hallam University, Alex Goffe, Head of Operations and Infrastructure, Keele University and Matthew Jones, Infrastructure Manager, University of Huddersfield

In this panel discussion, the panellists will be sharing their insights into their Cloud Migration journeys, how they started on this journey, lessons learned and what they would do differently if they could start over. The panel will end with a Q&A session, giving you the opportunity to ask the panellists any questions you have.

 

How to reduce your Data Footprint to improve cyber reliance, lower storage costs and increase sustainability
Adrian Cooper, Public Sector CTO, NetApp

As data volumes continue to grow, there is an ever-greater risk from ransomware and other forms of cyber-attack. In addition, there is a growing recognition of the environmental impact of data centres. In this session, Adrian Cooper, Public Sector CTO at NetApp, will highlight some tangible ways you can improve the visibility and governance of your data plus ways to reduce your overall data footprint to lower storage costs and improve sustainability whilst bolstering cyber security.

 

Operational Resilience is a journey not a destination
Adam Louca, Networking and Security Architect, Softcat

Adam will take you through what operational resilience means and how it has been applied to other sectors to change the way organisations prepare and respond to risks and threat. Using best practice from the financial services sector we will discuss how a version of this can be applied to Higher Education organisations to improve your ability to respond to an increasingly turbulent environment.

Don't panic
Sarah Lawson, Interim Director of Information Services and CISO, UCL

Join Sarah for a deep dive into two international Ransomware incidents that she lived through and survived! Explore the reality of how serious incidents evolve, the rabbit holes of confusion that occur and what in hindsight could have prevented or improved incident outcomes. The talk will look at some of the technical preventers and will give guidance about the use of kill chain knowledge and how the Mitre Att&ck framework can be your friend.

 

Day 2 - Wednesday 12th October

 

Preparing your institution for a cyber attack
Lauren Morris, Devolved IT Liaison Manager, University of Kent

Earlier this year the University was the victim of a cyber attack. Through reflection on the incident and recovery we have learned many lessons that we would like to share with the UCISA community. We hope by doing so that we will help other institutions minimise their risk of an attack and reduce the impact to their customers, if they have the misfortune of finding themselves in a similar position.

 

Looking back at recent incidents and how to prepare for the worst…
Dan C, NCSC

With cyberattacks continuing to occur at an alarming rate, we delve into some actor techniques that the NCSC have recently observed and look at ways these could have been mitigated, followed by a deep dive into considerations organisations should make around remediation and recovery when planning for the worst.

 

Accelerating Sustainability Goals with Cloud
Paul Moran, Principal Technical Account Manager, Amazon Web Services

IDC forecasts that the continued adoption of cloud computing globally could prevent more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions from 2021 through 2024. This is almost equivalent to removing the 2020 CO2 emissions of Germany and the U.K. combined. Learn about Amazon’s approach to sustainability and various use-cases for how technology such as cloud, open data, and AI/ML can be used to support sustainability transformation.

 

Sustainability and Procurement: How IT can help
Andrew Meikle, Head of CIS, Lancaster University

Looking at how we can use existing data to help inform procurement decisions in an increasingly complex world. How that data can help inform all procurement decisions including IT decisions.

 

Cyber Essentials – A Bumpy Roadmap to Compliance
Chris Haigh, Assistant Director and Head of PMO, Interim, Digital Services. University of Wolverhampton

The University of Wolverhampton recently embarked on the formidable challenge of attaining Cyber Essentials Basic accreditation for the entire university. This presentation will cover the cultural and technical challenges faced, and our approach to overcoming the many obstacles to achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation. With a tight timescale, the project grew from a 'nice idea' to a fully deployed InfoSec security solution which influenced many user experiences, work processes and technology decisions and strategies. The University of Wolverhampton presents a roadmap to Cyber Essentials compliance, with a few detours, cul de sacs and offroad meanders on route.

 

Defacement’s Not Dead – the tale of Bandar Togel
Ambrose Neville, Head of Information Security, University of Surrey

Higher Education institutions have long been a target for website defacement. Based on a real-world investigation, we’ll dig into a popular, but little-known, defacement challenge for technology leaders and university security teams, along with some recommendations about what you can do about it.