ITWeb has announced that the Cloud, Data Summit & DevOps Summit 2020 will be held on 11 February, at The Forum in Bryanston, and that the call for papers is now open.

"The Cloud Summit has become the data centre event of the year, and a place where evangelists, researchers, vendors and industry practitioners across Africa, to exchange ideas, talk about the latest tools and solutions, and discuss emerging trends, to define the future of data centre in SA. This year, we decided to merge Cloud Summit with our Data Centre event, and add DevOps to the mix, a first in South Africa," says Angela Mace, CRM and Events director at ITWeb.

According to Mace, a range of trends have reshaped the IT landscape over the last few years, including virtualisation, data centre, cloud and DevOps, although these trends have interacted with one another out of necessity in the past, they have remained fairly distinct.

"This is no longer the case, however. Data centre and IT leads are working far more closely with DevOps teams and application developers, as DevOps leads the charge in terms of tomorrow's solutions, services and means of delivery," she adds.

The event will feature three tracks, data centre, cloud and DevOps, and will focus on a wide range of topics, including hyperscale data centres; multi-cloud; public, private & hybrid cloud, cloud infrastructure; everything-as-a-service; cloud security & compliance; privacy, data management; data ownership; access control; agile working methodologies, containers; big data analytics; SecDevOps and many more.

"With this in mind, we are looking for experts on cloud, data centre or DevOps, those who have practical and relevant experience to share about the trends shaping these technologies, as well as interesting case studies to showcase," adds Mace.

Themed ‘Setting future innovation in motion', Mace says this year's programme will examine the way organisations today are addressing the performance and availability challenges caused by the data explosion, and will look beyond products and services, to the real issues facing the data centre industry today. "We will examine the hybrid environments to which many organisations are moving their workloads, as well as the edge, and how experts predict that it will forever alter data centres as we know them."

The event has become the most respected platform for senior business decision makers, buyers and executives, to unpack the trends and challenges around data centre technology, as well as learn about the services and technologies available to help them optimise their data centre investments.

"In addition, the Summit expects to attract a network of prospective client spanning the breadth of the cloud, data centre and DevOps chain, from enterprise and the public sector to data centre giants and the industry as a whole."

To submit a proposal, please email kirsten@itweb.co.za by 15 November 2020.