UPCOMING EVENTS
Cloud Architecture: Chicago (Rosemont/O’Hare), Illinois
Strategies for building and refining the architecture.
April 23, 2026
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
7 CPE / 0.7 CEU / CISSP / 7 PDU Credits Awarded
Conference location: Donald E. Stephens Convention Center Rosemont (O’Hare) Illinois
Overview
Once your organization’s business needs have been established, you can then create a plan that integrates infrastructure and platform strategy with the supporting cyber resilience.
What You Will Learn
In this one day conference attendees will learn:
- Cloud-Native Architecture: Maximizing Performance and Agility
- Building Resilient Cloud Architectures for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
- Cloud Security Architecture: Integrating Security into Every Layer
- Designing Scalable and Flexible Cloud Architectures for the Future
- Hybrid Cloud Architectures: Balancing On-Premise and Cloud Resources
- Cloud Architecture Best Practices: Learning from Successes and Failures (Panel Discussion)
CONFERENCE AGENDA
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. : Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. : From Cloud Adoption to Cloud Intentionality (Fireside Chat)
Viraj Jani, Head of Cloud, Cummins
Patrick Kinard, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure, Chicago Public Schools
Trent Ridgway, Head of IT, Infrastructure and Cloud, CISO, Anson Industries
Many organizations are already “in the cloud,” but few are architecting with clear intent. This session focuses on how mature cloud programs move beyond lift-and-shift toward deliberate architectural choices aligned with business outcomes.
Includes:
- Recognizing signs of accidental architecture
- Aligning cloud design with business priorities
- Making architectural trade-offs visible and intentional
Jani Kinard Ridgway
10:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. : Sponsor & Refreshment Break
10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. : How to Turn Network Telemetry into Real Operational Insight
Ben Biley, Solution Engineer, Kentik
Bottom line: telemetry in its different forms is necessary to understand the network, as it runs, as it moves data, its lifeblood, as it flows to and from our users, applications and beyond. Understanding the conversation requires incorporating legacy as well as new, improved methods; corelating them together, intelligently, and helping your team (and network) reduce their mean time to innocence, and more importantly, MTTR so that everyday isn’t spent in constant triage, it is spent in a more proactive and supplemental expertise to the business, not drawn down by outdated or inefficient methods of troubleshooting. Understanding how you can mine/farm the insights into your network enables you to more intelligently plan capacity, understand baselining, visualize/contextualize network data patterns; helping you understand the network better (inside and out, onprem/hybrid/cloud). Observability is key, the path you create for your data is the backbone for your business and applications.
Biley
11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. :How to Design and Build a GenAI Ready Architecture
Raj Mehta, Technical Delivery Director at Snowflake
The promise of Generative AI is clear, but most organizations are not architecturally prepared to deliver on it. Despite growing investment in LLMs, agents, and “copilots”, the majority of GenAI initiatives stall not because of model limitations, but because of foundational gaps in data quality, governance, and infrastructure readiness.
This presentation introduces a practical framework for evaluating and building a GenAI-Ready Architecture: One that positions your organization to move from experimentation to production-grade AI at scale. We’ll examine the critical architectural pillars that underpin successful GenAI adoption!
Mehta
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. : Lunch and Exhibit Break
1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. : Designing a Unified Data Fabric for Modern Cloud Architectures
Dana Racine, Solutions Architect, Ctera
As organizations modernize their environments in line with evolving cloud architecture strategies, data management has become a central challenge. Supply chain pressures, rising storage costs, and the rapid adoption of AI are forcing IT leaders to rethink how data is stored, accessed, and operationalized across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This session will explore how emerging architectural approaches—such as software-defined models that decouple performance from capacity—fit into broader cloud strategies. We’ll examine how capabilities like global namespaces, lifecycle management, and data mobility can help create more cohesive data environments that span on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
The discussion will focus on practical considerations for designing scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient data architectures. Attendees will gain insight into how organizations are evolving beyond traditional storage models and exploring new ways to unify file and object data, improve accessibility, and better leverage unstructured data within their cloud and AI initiatives.
Racine
2:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. : Refreshment Break
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. : Architecting for Human Systems: Teams, Skills, and Operations
Cloud architecture decisions directly affect how teams build, deploy, and operate systems. This session connects architectural choices to organizational structure, skills, and day-to-day operations.
Includes:
- Conway’s Law and cloud architecture
- Designing for operational clarity and ownership
- Reducing cognitive load for engineering teams
4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. : Cloud Architecture Panel: Hard Lessons and Honest Trade-Offs
This closing panel moves beyond hype to discuss real-world cloud architecture challenges. Panelists will share lessons learned, mistakes made, and how their thinking has evolved over time.
Includes:
- When simplicity beats “best practice”
- Revisiting architectural decisions as systems mature
- What architects would do differently today
- Audience Q&A
Moderator:
Eric Dominguez, Director, Channels, Summit
Panelists will include:
- Rajitha Gangishetty, Senior Manager, Solutions Architect, Hilton
- Sandeep Nema, Director, Head of Enterprise Architecture, Cook County – Bureau of Technology
- Aman Sardana, Expert Application Architect, CapitalOne
- Cloud Executives sharing the strategies, tactics, and lessons learned.
Dominguez Gangishetty Nema Sardana
Conference Price: $349.00 per person
Each attendee will receive a certificate awarding 7 CPE credits for CISSP continuing education, in addition to 0.7 CEUs and 7 PDUs. CISSP is a registered certification mark of (ISC)², Inc.
Exhibits
As is always the case at CAMP IT Conferences events, the talks will not include product presentations. During the continental breakfast, coffee breaks, and the luncheon break you will have the opportunity to informally meet representatives from the following sponsoring companies, who have solutions in the area of the conference.
