ABSTRACT
Defence missions are not static but continuously in motion whether reacting nimbly to the immediate circumstances of warfare across land, air space, and cyber realms or the critical and ever evolving process of military readiness. Accurate and rapid data is core to ensuring success. The traditional approach of relying solely on data-at-rest technology where data is collected in silos and sits passively waiting for retroactive querying or batch analytics is insufficient. Today a characteristic of highly successful organisations, in industry and government, is that they are powered by data in motion. This session will explore what a data in motion architecture looks like and how it enables defence missions to operate at the speed of their data.

BIOGRAPHY
As Field CTO Americas for Confluent, Mr. LaForest works with customers across a broad spectrum of industries and government enabling them to realise the benefits of a data in motion and event driven architecture. Mr LaForest also serves as an independent consultant to industry and government on data architectures. Most recently, he served as the industry advisor for US DIA's MARS program but has worked throughout the DoD. He is passionate about innovation in data technology and has spent 26 years helping customers wrangle data at massive scale. His technical career spans diverse areas from software engineering, NoSQL, data science, cloud computing, machine learning, and building statistical visualisation software but began with code slinging at DARPA as a teenager. Mr. LaForest holds degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Virginia.