When airline Virgin Australia came out of administration in late 2020 following a horror year due to COVID lockdowns, its IT team needed to grow rapidly from a shop staffed by around 100 people managing systems with limited funding to one that would spend $100 million annually on projects. This has meant that a significantly expanded tech team has been retooled to deploy new technologies and delivery capabilities.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly as he chats to David Hogarth, chief information officer at Virgin Australia about how a more diverse team has helped the airline grow and transform over the past two-and-a-half years.

This will discuss:

• How Virgin has moved from an organisation that underinvested in technology to one that is now halfway through a major digital transformation program.
• The ways in which Virgin has attracted women to the IT team, which now employs 300 internal and 600 external staff (40% of permanent technology staff are women).
• Why 80% of all transformation projects across the airline are technology-related and the projects that are at the heart of this change (fixing tech debt across data centres, deploying network infrastructure and physical security, a digital ecosystem that includes a new mobile app, loyalty and baggage systems to reduce customer stress, a new ERP system, as well as a website).
• How a refreshed culture has helped strengthen the tech team.

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Gallagher Bassett is the largest third-party claims administrator in Australia – it manages claims on behalf of insurers, brokers, government bodies and self-insured organisations. In recent times, automation technologies have been used by the organisation to streamline activities such as the processing of invoices and workers compensation claims.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly, as he chats to Gallagher Bassett’s chief information, product and strategy officer, Nathan Pilgrim, about how the organisation is using data generated by these automation tools to create new products that it is taking to market.

They will discuss:

• How this data is being used for service provider scoring and reviewing to identify high and low performing providers.
• A new legal scoring product that uses data to recommend a provider that will provide the best outcome based on a customer’s particular circumstances.
• The organisation’s plans to sell this information to legal firms and clients as a future revenue stream to drive superior outcomes.
• How this type of data analysis is also used to alleviate the problem of not being able to find skilled people in the marketplace.

A five-year digitisation programme at ADCO Constructions, one of the largest construction private business in Australia, has helped increase create operational efficiencies and consolidate data across its Australia operation.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly, and ADCO Constructions’ chief information officer, Doug Zuzic, as they discuss the role digital transformation has played in helping the organisation achieve its objectives.

They will cover:

• How ADCO has shifted from legacy processes to integrated platforms under a digitisation initiative.
• How this program has improved project controls and transparency, and better data.
• Key digital projects that have streamlined procurement and reporting and helped to improve workflows across the organisation.
• How digital workflows have supported the company’s ESG strategy and driven sustainability initiatives.

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· Creating a winning data management strategy

· Mapping the wins and challenges

· Ensuring the source data in the analysis is timely and

trustworthy.

Approximately 30% of the world’s data volume is being generated by healthcare, and the small slice of that generated at GCHHS is used to improve the quality and efficiency of care. Following the digitisation of our electronic medical record in 2019 GCHHS are now truly in the realm of big data and all of the opportunity that brings, but data and analytics maturity in public health care organisations in Australia lags behind industry at large.

Join Phil Bailey to explore GCHHS’ journey to a modern data platform. This will include:

• Building the right platform for you
• Start small, prove value, and learn quickly
• Engaging partners to accelerate delivery
• Leveraging the brilliance of your organisation

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Barry Mather, chief digital officer at Anglicare Southern Queensland hesitates to use the word ‘transformation’ when he discusses how legacy technology infrastructure is making way for new systems and applications. Technology is not changing the way that the large aged, community and home care provider operates, but it is helping to provide more efficient ways of providing services to residents and clients. A big piece of the puzzle is how data is analysed, using machine learning algorithms, to determine how around 20,000 clients are responding to its care services.

Join Sit-Down’s director of research and production, Byron Connolly, as he chats to Barry Mather about:

• How the organisation completes sentiment analysis that helps determine how people feel about its home care service delivery.
• How this data is used to improve the organisation’s service delivery.
• How this same approach is used to determine the reasons why internal staff leave the organisation to help reduce attrition.
• Data analysis that enables the provider to work out which clients are most suited to its services based on predicted spend (and the ethical questions that need to be asked when making these decisions.)
• The road to getting access to clean, well governed data across the organisation as legacy systems are slowly being replaced.

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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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