In a slowing global economy, CISOs are being asked by their boards to use already tight budgets to reduce the risk of their organisations falling victim to damaging cyber-attacks. As enterprises move more and more applications and services to the cloud, investments need to be made to secure this infrastructure. This is why cloud security is essential to ensure data that is sitting in the cloud is being adequately protected.

Join Aqua Security’s Stuart Gomez and Madhul Sachdeva at this month’s Sit-Down as they discuss how cloud security enables organisations to rapidly deploy services in the cloud while ensuring compliance with local regulations to help drive growth. They will talk about how cloud security can help enterprises cut costs and increase revenue through automation; while reducing risk, exposure and downtime.

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High inflation and continuing interest rate rises, plunging consumer confidence and large-scale staff layoffs across organisations mean there’s a significant risk that the Australian economy will contract this year. Although federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, believes it’s still possible that Australia could avoid a recession, the threat still looms large. Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly, as he chats to senior technology executives about how their organisations and tech teams are dealing with a slowing economy and preparing for a possible recession.

They will discuss:

• The impact that high inflation and a slowing Australian economy is having on their technology operations and budgets for tech and digital programs. For instance, are they implementing short-term initiatives that deliver faster results?
• The technology and digital projects that they will be working on for the rest of the year and what is driving those initiatives.
• How skills gaps across many areas of IT are impacting their plans.
• The technology and business lessons that they have learned over the past few years and how those learnings are being applied now.

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For CIOs, finding technologies that will provide efficiencies and cost savings that will help their organisations deal with an uncertain global macroeconomic environment is getting harder. There is a bevy of solutions available in the market that promise to take the load off teams by automating key business processes.

Join David Irecki, Director, Solution Consulting – APJ at Boomi as he shares insights, using case study examples, that illustrate how integration and automation can help achieve what every CIO cares about: security, operational excellence, innovation, and shareholder value.

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Hybrid work is here to stay. Just about every organisation across Australia now has post-COVID hybrid work arrangements in place where workers can alternate between the office and remote locations like their homes. The challenge is making sure that flexible work works for everyone, no matter what their role entails. MYOB is one organisation that is getting flexible work right for its 2,000 staff dispersed across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, and Christchurch.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly, as he chats to MYOB’s head of people, Sally Elson about how the software organisation is managing flexible working arrangements for its staff.

They will discuss:

• MYOB’s ‘flexperience’ initiative, the benefits it provides to workers, and the technology behind it.
• How MYOB’s staff have responded to the program and the challenges that the organisation has needed to overcome.
• How to strike a good balance between remote and office work environments to ensure that a good organisational culture is maintained and younger staff members can learn by osmosis.
• The motivations of large organisations across Australia that are demanding workers come back to the office and the potential pitfalls of taking that approach.

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The global economy is on the downswing and technology vendors are taking steps to claw back much needed revenue. One of those steps might be making an ambit claim, where a supplier makes an initial demand in expectation of a counteroffer. For example, this might apply to a claim related to software non-compliance at a customer site. In other cases, there may be an unexpected change in the pricing of IT products and services.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly, and RACV’s chief information officer, Idris Shamsi, as they discuss how the membership-based motoring and mobility, home, energy and leisure services provider responds to and defends against these types of claims. Idris will cover the discussions he and his team have with vendors to ensure RACV is not paying more for technology products and services than is required and what to do if there is a shortfall.

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MYOB has been part of the fabric of doing business in Australia and New Zealand for more than 30 years. One of the side effects of this success is a mix of modern and legacy technologies including an ageing ERP. Solving for the difficulties in finding specialists in the marketplace, the desire to focus in house talent on the go forward technologies and the support from Oracle proving too costly for the level of service required.

Join Sit-Down’s Director of Research & Production, Byron Connolly, as he chats to MYOB’s Platform Lead, Catherine Quinn, and Engineering Manager, Stefan Vargheese, about how engaging with third-party Unified software support provider, Rimini Street, has helped the organisation overcome these issues.

Panelists will discuss:

1.      Why ERP support process was becoming unsuitable for the organisation.

2.      How third-party support helps to improve efficiencies and reduced costs.

3.      How MYOB is reinvesting these savings back into the business.

Interview Questions:

Why ERP support process was becoming unsuitable for the organization

·      What were the challenges or problem/s you were trying to solve?

·      How have these challenges/process affected you and your team?

How third-party support helps improve efficiencies and reduce costs

·      What led you to consider getting help from Rimini Street (for both your software support and your application managed services?)

·      Why did you decide to unify your support and services with one single IT provider, Rimini Street?

How MYOB is reinvesting these savings back into the business.

·      How did MYOB benefit from having Rimini Street support and what does this mean to you and your business?

·      Talk about business continuity, improved relationship with the team, cost optimizations, talent optimizations which increased productivity, ability to support more strategic initiatives – Digital first

·      Have you been able to shift attention to other aspects of the business? – become more strategic and deliver more innovation

·      Lessons learned? Advice to others exploring a similar agenda?

When Adam Carthew joined Service Victoria in 2020 as its new chief information officer, the agency was a startup in a fight for survival. Carthew was charged with the job of building a culture across its growing technology team during a time when many people were working remotely.

While battling the workforce challenges that arose from the pandemic, Carthew grew his technology team from three squads to nearly 30 with the collective team creating successful innovations over the period.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly as he chats to Adam about the challenges he has faced moving from the private sector to a government organisation that is not viewed as an engine for revenue.

They will discuss:

• How Carthew and his team quickly built the Service Victoria app for citizens to check-in at various locations during the pandemic and the hurdles that needed to be overcome, including managing various stakeholders at partner agencies.
• How changing Service Victoria’s underlying platform has enabled the organisation to build and scale services very quickly such as border permits and a voucher program.
• Why agencies are looking to Service Victoria to help them create and deploy innovations faster than they have before.

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Automation, leveraging process Management and other technologies, has opened up new possibilities. The pace of adoption has been rapid. Institutions of all sizes globally are leveraging automation to drive value. When done right, automation has proven to deliver real benefits, join this session to explore the power of automation and why it could be your key to success:

•            streamline processes

•            improve efficiency & accuracy

•            maximise compliance

•            reduce costs

•            improve productivity.

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Choosing a new path in work, and in life for that matter, can often be scary. That feeling of uncertainty often prevents talented people from taking the next step in their careers. Whether you are a CIO with a desire to be a COO or CEO, or a technology head looking to move to the tech c-suite, overcoming imposter syndrome and a fear of the unknown has the potential to derail your plans. Join PointsBet’s chief information officer, Mary-Beth Hosking as she explains the way tech leaders can overcome their fears, gain some new skills, and transfer their existing capabilities into new roles.

Much of Michael Fagan’s job as chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow is making sure his team works on the right projects and kills the bad ones. His motto is, ‘say no to the good ideas so that you can yes to the great ones.’

Join Michael at the June 6 Sit-Down in Melbourne as he discusses the ways in which you, as an IT leader, can better focus your energies on the technology and digital projects that will deliver real value to your organisation. Michael will draw on his extensive experience as a tech leader, providing real-world examples from previous roles that highlight why he killed technology projects that had promise, but were not delivering what was needed.

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In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies have started to play a larger role in the IVF process to give would-be parents a better chance of creating healthy babies. More intelligent use of data certainly helps give clinicians the insights they need provide a fuller picture to anxious and hopeful couples.

At Virtus Health, an integrated AI engine provides decision support at each stage of treatment that is contextualised and embedded within clinical workflows. Genetic testing results are presented within these workflows with the system also supporting automated feedback and mood tracker reporting.

But what ethical questions do Virtus Health’s teams need to ask when deciding if these technologies are mature enough to be used during what is a very stressful and personal process for people?

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly and Virtus Health’s chief digital health officer, Jorge Silveira as they uncover the ethical considerations around using AI and ML technologies during the IVF process.

In a slowing global economy, CISOs are being asked by their boards to use already tight budgets to reduce the risk of their organisations falling victim to damaging cyber-attacks. As enterprises move more and more applications and services to the cloud, investments need to be made to secure this infrastructure. This is why cloud security is essential to ensure data that is sitting in the cloud is being adequately protected.

Join Aqua Security’s Stuart Gomez and Madhul Sachdeva at this month’s Sit-Down as they discuss how cloud security enables organisations to rapidly deploy services in the cloud while ensuring compliance with local regulations to help drive growth. They will talk about how cloud security can help enterprises cut costs and increase revenue through automation; while reducing risk, exposure and downtime.

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For CIOs, finding technologies that will provide efficiencies and cost savings that will help their organisations deal with an uncertain global macroeconomic environment is getting harder. There is a bevy of solutions available in the market that promise to take the load off teams by automating key business processes.

Join David Irecki, Director, Solution Consulting – APJ at Boomi as he shares insights, using case study examples, that illustrate how integration and automation can help achieve what every CIO cares about: security, operational excellence, innovation, and shareholder value.

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Resilience to ransomware and wiper attacks requires a hardened data resilience solution—one with safeguards and controls to help thwart threat actors from accessing and destroying critical backup data. And one that helps organisations rapidly recover critical business processes.

Join this session to learn how to:

·      Prevent the destruction of backup data with immutability and cyber vaulting.

·      Detect emerging attacks, threats, and vulnerabilities using AI/ML.

·      Support rapid recovery and help ensure that recovery doesn’t reintroduce threats or vulnerabilities.

·      Assess and understand what sensitive data may have been exposed.

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Roshan Daluwakgoda, chief information security officer at Eastern Health has 20 years of experience in formulating cyber resiliency strategies.

Join Roshan at our June Sit-Down in Melbourne as he discusses how to create robust cyber resiliency and recovery strategies, the key lessons he has learned from breaches over the years, and areas to be focused to minimise the impacts.

In late 2022 following some notable damaging cyber-attacks, the Australian government approved new laws that significantly increase the maximum penalties for repeated or serious data breaches. The penalties are high: a $50 million fine, three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information, or 30% of a company’s adjusted turnover in the relevant period.

It’s enough to create sleepless nights for CEOs, CISOs and their boards. Although these penalties are severe, the real cost of a cyber breach is a loss of reputation as customers leave in their droves and share prices suffer.

Join Andrew Philp, ANZ Platform Strategy Lead at Trend Micro as he discusses how your organisation can prepare for and respond to a breach to reduce reputational damage. The session will also cover why point security solutions and internal resourcing don’t provide the protection and payback that’s required, and why organisations are now consolidating tools and vendors they work with.

In the face of swift technological innovation and the evolving threat landscape, Andrew will also discuss how organisations can benefit from adopting a platform-based approach to help better evaluate, understand, communicate, and mitigate cyber risk.

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Completing regular internal audits of your cyber infrastructure is key to ensuring your organisation complies with security regulations and requirements. At the Melbourne Sit-Down on June 6, Arnav Panchlothia, head of audit, security at National Australia Bank (NAB) will uncover how he and his team approach cyber security audits at the Big 4 bank.

Arnav will discuss:

• Why audits are crucial to ensure the most effective cyber policies and procedures have been put in place to offer the best protection against attacks.
• Why we need to rethink traditional internal audits.
• NAB’s strategies for successfully completing offensive and defensive security platform auditing.
• What continuous auditing means and the cyber tools that are available to complete these audits.
• How to approach auditing conversations with the board and leadership teams.

One of Robert Turney’s big challenges as head of cyber security at iSelect is having access to a robust data pipeline that supports decision-making across the organisation. The brutal fact of the matter is there is data scattered across company that he simply cannot access.

Join Robert at this month’s Melbourne Sit-Down as he discusses how iSelect, which helps millions of Australians to compare and purchase insurance, utilities, and personal finance products, is building a data pipeline to enable the ingestion and transformation of security and system logs.

Robert will discuss:

-       Why traditional data search, monitoring and analysis tools often become too expensive to use and how he is empowering his cyber team to use the tools they want to rapidly respond to cyber incidents.

-       How a data pipeline will enable iSelect to train its artificial intelligence tools with real-time data down the track.

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Cyber risk quantification, a process used to evaluate the potential financial impact of a particular cyber threat, is gaining in popularity as a useful way for CISOs to communicate risks to their CEOs and boards. Using risk scenarios that put the threat into real dollar terms that the c-suite can explicitly understand makes sense.

Nigel Hedges, group head of cyber security at Kmart, will discuss how he uses cyber risk quantification and other techniques to convince executives to invest in cyber security tools that improve the retailer’s cyber posture.

He will cover how to provide information that will resonate with c-suite executives to help with their decision-making when it comes to cyber risk in the wake of recent high-profile attacks in Australia. He will also discuss some of the difficulties with this process and how they can be overcome.

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CISOs clearly don’t have unlimited budgets to spend on securing their organisation’s infrastructure. It’s almost impossible to protect against every possible threat. But, according to Chathura Abeydeera, director, cyber security and incident response at KPMG, taking a threat intelligence approach that involves having a better understanding of the criminal groups that are targeting their organisation’s particular market sector goes a long way to providing a more targeted cyber defence.

Join Chathura at this month’s Sit-Down as he discusses how CISOs, and their teams can do this.

He will discuss:

• Practical approaches to prioritising your cyber spend to increase visibility and build a good cyber posture with your available budget.
• Why it’s important to understand the telemetries used by threat actors to engineer the best protection.
• Techniques that can be used to identify cyber criminals that are likely to attack your organisation.

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