AI Agents in IT Infrastructure: A New Paradigm for Solution Architects

AI agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs), are revolutionizing IT infrastructure by enabling intelligent automation, decision-making, and system optimization. This session provides IT architects and business professionals with a technical overview of how AI agents can be integrated into existing IT environments to enhance efficiency, reduce manual tasks, and improve workflows.

We will explore the capabilities of LLMs and SLMs, comparing them with traditional rule-based systems, and demonstrate how these AI agents can automate processes, support decision-making, and drive business outcomes. Through practical use cases and Azure-based demonstrations, attendees will gain a solid understanding of how to incorporate AI-driven solutions into their own IT infrastructure.

The concepts and approach are intended to be vendor and product agnostic, ensuring broad applicability. However, the demonstrations will utilize the Azure platform to illustrate these principles in action.

From Vision to Execution: Building Scalable and Secure AI-Ready Infrastructure

In this session, we will examine the architecture and explore the essential components that make up an AI-ready infrastructure, as well as best practices for supporting AI-driven initiatives. While each attendee’s learning journey is unique, this session is tailored for IT architects and professionals with a basic understanding of cloud administration. Through demonstrations, this session covers technical depth with operation details and focusing on the foundational aspects of AI infrastructure, including scalable cloud setups, secure network configurations, and management practices. It is designed to provide actionable knowledge and hands-on experience that can be applied to your projects.

Building and Testing an Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) Lab Against Web Threat

This session provides a step-by-step guide to creating a functional test lab in Azure for evaluating Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF). The demonstration includes setting up a virtual network, deploying Kali Linux VM for simulated attack scenarios, configuring OWASP Juice Shop as a vulnerable web application, and integrating Application Gateway with WAF. The session will focus on how WAF protects against common web application threats, such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection, by actively detecting and blocking simulated attacks in the lab environment.

Azure BCDR in Action: Deploying Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery Solutions (2-Part Series)

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) are essential for ensuring operational resilience, yet they are often seen as complex and costly. Azure simplifies these challenges by offering a flexible, cloud-based approach to BCDR that streamlines the deployment of backup, restore, and disaster recovery solutions. By leveraging Azure’s scalability and cross-region capabilities, organizations can enhance resilience, reduce complexity, and lower the long-term costs typically associated with on-premises infrastructure and disaster recovery processes.
In this two-part series, Azure BCDR in Action, we will walk through the process of architecting, configuring, and managing BCDR solutions using an IIS/SQL application as an example:
• Part 1: Backup and Restore
• Part 2: Disaster Recovery
The concepts and architecture shared are applicable to a wide range of workloads, demonstrating how Azure can ensure business continuity, improve disaster recovery readiness, and drive operational efficiency across different environments.

Live Azure WAF Demo: Securing Web Apps Against Common Threats

In an era where web applications are increasingly targeted by sophisticated digital threats, implementing robust security measures is crucial. Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) offers a vital layer of defense designed to protect web applications from a range of exploits and vulnerabilities. This session provides a hands-on demonstration of Azure WAF using a test environment deployed via an Azure ARM template. The environment includes Azure WAF, the OWASP Juice Shop application—a deliberately vulnerable app designed for security testing—and a Kali Linux VM for simulating attacks.

Attendees will witness Azure WAF in action through a live demo, showcasing its ability to defend against real-world threats. By observing Azure WAF's capabilities in this controlled test environment, participants will gain practical insights into its effectiveness in mitigating common web application vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection attacks. The goal of this session is to provide a clear understanding of how Azure WAF operates and to illustrate its practical applications in enhancing web application security.