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Belgium 11-12-25 Country Members Physical english

Next Generation Digital Twins - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

Imagine being able to monitor, simulate, and optimise an entire city, factory, or supply chain in real time. Next-generation digital twins are making this vision a reality, transforming how we manage and understand complex systems. By creating dynamic virtual replicas of physical assets and processes, digital twins allow organisations to predict issues, optimize performance, and make data-driven decisions with unprecedented accuracy.This event will explore how digital twins are being used across industries to revolutionize the way we operate and maintain large-scale, intricate systems—whether it’s the infrastructure of a smart city, the efficiency of a factory floor, or the resilience of global supply chains.Examples of Digital Twins in Action:Smart Cities: Urban planners can use digital twins to simulate traffic flow, monitor energy usage, or predict the impact of weather events on infrastructure. This enables cities to optimize resources and improve the quality of life for their citizens.Factories of the Future: Manufacturing plants are leveraging digital twins to monitor equipment in real time, prevent downtime, and optimize production lines. With predictive analytics, factories can avoid costly breakdowns and improve overall efficiency.Supply Chain Management: Complex supply chains, spanning continents and industries, can be modeled as digital twins to track shipments, simulate disruptions, and optimize logistics. Businesses can reduce inefficiencies and respond faster to market demands.Key Themes:Real-Time Monitoring and Simulation: How digital twins provide real-time insights into complex systems, allowing for dynamic response and optimization.Predictive Power: Leveraging AI and data analytics, digital twins help organisations predict and mitigate issues before they happen, from equipment failures to supply chain bottlenecks.Scalability Across Ecosystems: Digital twins aren’t limited to individual assets—learn how they can be scaled across entire ecosystems like smart cities or global supply chains for maximum impact.Building Trust and Security: With digital twins handling critical infrastructure and sensitive data, what are the security and governance frameworks needed to ensure trust in these virtual systems?Why You Should Attend:Next-generation digital twins are no longer just a concept—they are revolutionizing industries by offering a new way to manage complexity. Whether you’re looking to optimize a city, factory, or supply chain, this event will provide practical insights into how digital twins can transform your organisation’s operations and drive future innovation.

Belgium 12-12-25 Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

Everyone wants value for money. But in IT, that value is spread across infrastructure, software, services, and people. Your infra spend is creeping up. App maintenance is eating your budget. New development is exciting but comes with hidden overhead. And people costs, from operations to engineering, remain the largest, most overlooked slice. If you’re under pressure to optimise without compromise, this session brings the right questions, trade-offs, and shared lessons to the table.

Belgium 16-12-25 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table: Mastering Enterprise Service Management

This CIONET Round Table will focus on how the IT department can be the enabler that unlocks organisational efficiencies and helps to improve the employee experience. We will explore how CIOs and Digital Leaders can fundamentally transform the internal service experience by breaking down organizational silos, orchestrating complex cross-functional workflows, and leveraging a unified platform to deliver a truly frictionless experience for every employee.

December 12, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

January 13, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Moving Legacy Systems to the Cloud Efficiently : Balancing cost, risk, and continuity in complex migrations

Migrating legacy systems to the cloud remains one of the toughest balancing acts in IT. Every choice affects stability, cost, and trust at once, and what starts as a modernisation effort quickly turns into a negotiation between ambition and reality. Suddenly budgets rise, dependencies appear late, and timelines tighten as old architectures collide with new expectations. In the end, success depends on sequencing, ownership, and aligning business priorities with infrastructure limits, and not only on technical readiness. Making it work requires more than a plan on paper. Knowing which systems genuinely belong in the cloud, which can wait, and which should stay put shapes the entire roadmap and defines its success. Each refactoring decision sets the level of future flexibility, but it also drives cost and risk. The trade-offs between speed, sustainability, and resilience only become clear once migration begins and pressure builds. Let’s discuss how to plan migrations that stay on track, manage hidden dependencies, and handle downtime with confidence. Let’s also discuss how governance, testing, and vendor coordination keep progress visible and credible. Are you in? A closed conversation for those who turn cloud migration from a disruption into a long-term advantage.

January 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

AI-Driven Development: Redesigning workflows, responsibilities, and trust in the age of automation

AI coding assistants entered development teams quietly, but their impact grows by the day. What started as autocomplete now shapes architecture decisions, documentation, and testing. And when productivity gains are visible, so are new risks: security blind spots, uneven quality, and the slow erosion of shared standards. Teams move faster, but not always in the same direction. The challenge has become integration rather than adoption. And new questions have risen: how do you blend automation into established practices without losing oversight? When is human review still essential, and what should the rules of collaboration between developer and machine look like? As AI tools learn from proprietary code, where do responsibility and accountability sit? Let’s talk about how to redefine those workflows, balancing creativity with control, and protecting code quality in a hybrid human-AI environment. A closed conversation on where AI accelerates progress, where it introduces new debt, and how development culture must evolve to stay credible.

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DeKalb County Schools District proactively protects environment with the Trend Vision One™ platform

DeKalb County Schools Partners with Trend Micro to safeguard its network and data. By leveraging Trend Vision One, the district is ensuring the security of students, staff, and sensitive information.

OVERVIEW

With 13 schools and nearly 9,000 students, DeKalb Country Schools District prides itself on being a hub for educational excellence—and a pillar of its community. Local resident, Jimmy Benefield, who took over the role of technology coordinator in 2020, sees a personal side to this mission. “Being entrusted with servicing and maintaining all of our campuses, the network, and the computer infrastructure here with the school system, it’s like I’m able to give back to the community I grew up in,” says Benefield. He relies on Trend Vision One™ to keep the district’s students, teachers, administration, and staff secure from cyber threats.

Seeing the complete picture — from servers, cloud, email, network to endpoints — is crucial to maintaining a healthy network. Having access to all of this information in one portal really saves time.

Jimmy Benefield - Technology Coordinator, DeKalb County Schools District

CHALLENGES

“Our biggest goal is to protect our environment from potential risks, ensuring our end users are safe and our network, endpoints, cloud, and email are secure,” says Benefield. “With the rise of phishing, ransomware, and other attacks increasingly becoming more disruptive for school districts across the country, keeping DeKalb County Schools is our priority with my five‑person team.”

“Protecting our students’ access to information online and addressing potential risks, such as unsecured apps, is a constant concern,” says Benefield. “Our team must also synchronize their efforts across multiple departments and schools, wearing many hats to meet diverse needs—from data integration to network infrastructure for new construction projects.”

WHY TREND

Faced with a need to increase protection on the network when he came on board in 2020, Benefield chose Trend to secure the district’s servers. “When DeKalb County Schools District experienced a ransomware attack on our computers seven months after our purchase, our Trend deployment was the game-changer in keeping the servers protected. The Trend team was with us every step of the way during the rebuild and recovery,” says Benefield.

We realized purchasing more security products was essential to our ransomware recovery process. The level of support we received from Trend during our recovery made it the obvious first choice.

Jimmy Benefield - Technology Coordinator, DeKalb County Schools District

SOLUTION

“We added Trend Vision One™ – XDR for Endpoints and Workloads after the incident to give us visibility over our network. The addition of XDR for Endpoints and Workloads helped us to discover machines that were still infected, which saved us considerable time getting those devices sent back to our district office so we could clean, protect, and return them to users.”

The district now enjoys the complete security of Trend Vision One. “Seeing the complete picture with Trend Vision One—from servers, cloud, and network to endpoints and email—is crucial to maintaining a healthy network. Having full visibility and access to all of this information in one portal really saves time,” says Benefield.

RESULTS

DeKalb County Schools District has experienced a transformation since beginning its partnership with Trend. “Trend Vision One has streamlined monitoring and provided a single interface to manage our district’s servers, cloud, email, network, and endpoints,” says Benefield. “We’ve saved valuable time, allowing my small team to focus on critical tasks, ensuring systems are up and running seamlessly.”

Benefield especially praises the Trend network security solutions. “With Trend Vision One™ – TippingPoint™, the geo block feature allows us to see on the dashboard how many attacks we are blocking hourly from other countries, and it is continuously scanning for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We’re lucky to have TippingPoint up and running to manage those threats,” he says.

“The Trend Vision One™ – XDR for Email notifications have also become a critical feature, alerting our team to security risks and prompting rapid responses and investigations. With enhanced visibility into the network and ongoing reporting, we have successfully overseen the elimination of older device operating systems and can help my team to better prioritize and keep operations running smoothly,” says Benefield.

WHAT'S NEXT

DeKalb County Schools District is proactively bolstering security measures by focusing on training and awareness. “I’d like to make our staff and students more knowledgeable about potential attacks and ways to avoid them—not just to secure our network but to provide them with insight to reduce the chances of being taken advantage of at home,” says Benefield.

“I’m excited to use Trend Vision One to run phishing campaigns that aid in staff training,” says Benefield. As the digital landscape evolves, with the support of Trend, Benefield and his team are set to address these security concerns head‑on, fostering a safer digital environment. “Peace of mind and sleeping soundly is what I am now able to do with Trend Vison One in place. The Trend security solutions and team cover me and life is more peaceful.”

Business benefits:

Unified security platform empowers the IT team to focus on critical tasks with a single interface to manage infrastructure
Enables proactive threat mitigation and prompt responses to security risks
Bolsters the school district’s response to ransomware, phishing, and other critical risks to students and staff

Technologies

Apex One™ Cloud One – Workload Security Trend Micro Cloud App Security™ Trend Micro TippingPoint Trend Micro™Deep Discovery™ Trend Vision One™ cloud security platform Vision One™ with Managed XDR

CIONET Business Circles

Healthcare Circle

Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?

Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.

Les Rencontres

Découvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !

Female Leadership Circle

CIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.