null

Belgium 10-09-2026 Squad Only Physical english

Building the Infrastructure AI Needs: From computer and data access to scalability, cost control, and operational readiness.

AI is moving from pilots into operational use, and the infrastructure question is becoming more concrete. The challenge is deciding what needs to be built, expanded, controlled, or delayed as usage grows. Three pressure points usually appear first. - Compute capacity requires careful planning: teams need enough GPU, cloud, or specialised processing power, while keeping utilisation and cost under control. - Data movement becomes more demanding: AI needs access to data across systems, with latency, security, integration, and quality managed from the start. - Operational control becomes essential: monitoring, access rights, resilience, cost visibility, and ownership need to scale with usage. The working question is simple: how do we support AI at scale while keeping infrastructure efficient, governed, and financially sustainable? If you are working through these choices, let’s compare approaches with others facing similar constraints.

Belgium 15-09-2026 Squad Only Virtual english

Turning AI Pilots into Daily Workflows: How to move from experimentation to adoption by redesigning work, ownership, controls, and habits.

AI pilots are easier to launch than to embed into daily operations. The challenge is changing how work happens once AI becomes part of decisions, tasks, handovers, and controls. Three pressure points tend to decide whether adoption holds. - Workflow fit matters: AI has to enter the flow of work as part of the process. - Ownership needs to be clear: someone must own the process, the controls, the exceptions, and the outcome. - User trust has to be built: people need to know when to rely on AI, when to challenge it, and when to escalate. The working question is simple: how do we move AI from promising pilots into daily work while keeping clarity, accountability, and risk control? If this is part of your current reality, let’s compare choices, constraints, and lessons learned.

Belgium 17-09-2026 Country Members Physical french

Les Rencontres: CTO: Le Saint Graal?

Pendant longtemps, le TCO donnait une impression de contrôle. On investissait, on amortissait, on optimisait. Les coûts étaient visibles, relativement prévisibles, et structurés autour d’une logique claire entre CAPEX et OPEX. Ce modèle ne suffit plus à expliquer où va réellement l’argent. Aujourd’hui, une part croissante des dépenses IT ne repose plus sur ce que l’on possède, mais sur ce que l’on consomme: des tokens générés par l’IA des agents qui exécutent des actions en continu des outils SaaS qui se multiplient dans les équipes du cloud qui s’adapte en permanence à l’usage Le coût ne disparaît pas, mais il devient plus diffus, plus dynamique, et souvent plus difficile à attribuer, à expliquer, et à maîtriser. C’est là que des approches comme le Technology Business Management, ou TBM, redeviennent particulièrement utiles: non pas comme un exercice de reporting supplémentaire, mais comme un moyen de relier concrètement les dépenses aux services, aux usages, et aux décisions. Et c’est là aussi que la question du “Saint Graal” revient, mais sous une autre forme. Vous vous demandez peut-être: Comment garder de la maîtrise quand la dépense dépend du comportement, des usages, et parfois même de systèmes autonomes ? Comment piloter l’équilibre CAPEX/OPEX quand le cloud, le SaaS et l’IA déplacent progressivement les coûts vers des modèles variables ? Quels coûts restent encore trop souvent hors radar: ressources métier, formation, support, intégration, sécurité, gouvernance ? Et surtout, qu’est-ce qu’un “bon TCO” veut encore dire quand il faut le mettre en regard d’objectifs parfois plus stratégiques, plus longs à mesurer, ou plus difficiles à quantifier: qualité de service, résilience, agilité, expérience utilisateur, capacité d’innovation ? Ce sont précisément ces questions qui seront au cœur de notre rencontre: une discussion ouverte entre pairs, ancrée dans la réalité du terrain, pas pour débattre de modèles idéaux, mais pour comprendre comment chacun tente, concrètement, de mesurer, d’attribuer et de reprendre le contrôle, sans réduire la valeur d’un choix technologique à son seul coût.

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

Trend Micro powers NHS cloud pioneer SLAM with multilayered security

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLAM) has significantly improved its security posture with Trend Micro. Trend Micro’s Deep Security enables SLAM to effectively protect its infrastructure from threats such as WannaCry. This has not only improved security, but also accelerated cloud adoption and led to cost savings.

OVERVIEW

The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLAM) is a London-based NHS trust specializing in mental health. It consists of four campus sites and over 70 community sites, with more than 5,000 employees. Stuart MacLellan is the head of operations for digital service at SLAM, where his team manages thousands of endpoints leveraging private and public cloud infrastructures.

CHALLENGES

Prior to choosing Trend Micro, MacLellan and his team were constantly challenged by high volumes of malware and viruses on the network, which led to system outages on occasion and ultimately a poor customer experience. In mission-critical environments like hospitals, this kind of impact is unsustainable in the delivery of critical frontline services.

At the same time, SLAM was evolving its infrastructure by adopting cloud services. It was the first NHS trust to migrate to Microsoft® Office 365® and moved to Microsoft® Azure® for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the first day of its launch in the UK. MacLellan recognized the need for a cloud-ready product suite to provide unified protection against zero-day and emerging threats across physical and hybrid cloud environments. He also required comprehensive threat detection at the network layer, which could be viewed holistic.

WHY TREND

For six years, SLAM has relied on Trend Micro to protect its 5,000 employees and clients using Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites, a multi-layered product approach to security that includes OfficeScan™ endpoint solution and InterScan™ Web Security Virtual Appliance. That superior performance and ability to root out threats gave MacLellan the confidence he needed to deepen the partnership with Trend Micro to include enhanced cloud and network security.

SLAM enhanced its protection with Trend Micro™ Deep Security™, Deep Discovery™ and Cloud App Security to secure their hybrid cloud data center, network, and cloud application layer.

"We’re a small team and run security as a linear layer across all our departments, so ease-of-use was essential. With Deep Security you get a holistic view from endpoint to servers and from cloud to network inspection, which was exactly what we needed."

Stuart MacLellan - Head of Operations for Digital Service, SLAM

SOLUTION

Deep Security is Trend Micro’s flagship data center security platform, offering unparalleled protection for physical and hybrid cloud environments, all from a single console. Deep Security is optimized for many of the most popular cloud platforms on the market, including Microsoft Azure.

It offered SLAM:

An “as-a-service” delivery model with consumption-based billing available through the AWS Marketplace
Host-based intrusion prevention system (IPS) that scales with your cloud to offer continuous protection
Automatic policy creation and management to ensure workloads are never left unprotected
Full integration with the Azure Security Center to monitor workloads and provide security alerts through the Azure portal
Automated virtual patching
The ability to apply layered security controls such as integrity monitoring, intrusion prevention, content filtering, and behavioral analysis, to the right place at the right time
Network level (intrusion detection system/IPS) and file integrity monitoring (FIM) to detect and prevent threats
Accelerated compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and more, thanks to ongoing audit reports and maximum protection

Deep Discovery is Trend Micro’s award-winning advanced threat detection tool. Powered by XGen™ security, it’s designed to monitor all ports and over 105 different network protocols. This allows you to discover advanced threats and targeted attacks moving in and out of the network and laterally across it.

Cloud App Security offers comprehensive protection in Office 365 environments, using sandbox analysis to spot and block ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), and other advanced threats. Over the past two years it has stopped over six million threats not spotted by Microsoft.

RESULTS

SLAM has already seen a range of benefits resulting from its decision to deepen its investment with Trend Micro. MacLellan was particularly impressed by the ability of Deep Security to offer management capabilities from a single pane of glass.

“We’re a small team and run security as a linear layer across all our departments, so ease-of-use was essential. With Deep Security you get a holistic view from endpoint to servers and from cloud to network inspection, which was exactly what we needed,” MacLellan explains. “Although we added more protection to our organization through the various suites, the centralized pane of glass Trend Micro offers hasn’t added any management overheads. It’s more efficient than having four different vendors in place.”

What’s more, Deep Security kept the organization safe from WannaCry while SLAM’s counterparts in the wider NHS were less fortunate. An estimated 19,000 operations and appointments were cancelled as a result of the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017.

“We had protection through virtual patching and got assurance through talking to Trend Micro support. It was a very controlled and managed experience for SLAM,” says MacLellan.

That protection has been matched by Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ Inspector and its ability to hunt down threats at the network layer, as well as Cloud App Security, which blocks malware targeting SLAM’s Office 365 platform.

Most importantly, having an effective, optimized layer of security in place has helped SLAM accelerate its adoption of cloud services to become a more agile and efficient organization. This has generated significant cost savings through improved capacity management, whilst driving a shift from being “a reactive IT department to a proactive, consultative department that is working to make the business better.”

"Although we added more protection to our organization through the various suites, the centralized pane of glass Trend Micro offers hasn’t added any management overheads. It’s more efficient than having four different vendors in place."

Stuart MacLellan - Head of Operations for Digital Service, SLAM

WHAT'S NEXT

With Trend Micro providing peace of mind to the IT team, they now have the time to look at more strategic plans, which will further help to reduce cyber risk. Improving incident response is high on the list, especially in light of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), says MacLellan.

Technologies

Trend Micro Cloud App Security™ Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ Trend Micro™Deep Discovery™

Partners

CIONET Business Circles

Cyber Circle

CIONET’s Cyber Circle: a new three-event programme exclusively focusing on the most urgent, complex, and high-impact challenges in cybersecurity today. Launched in 2026, this initiative brings together CISOs, CIOs, and senior IT executives with a strong interest in cybersecurity for three curated gatherings each year. As part of CIONET’s trusted executive community, the Cyber Circle provides a confidential, peer-driven environment to exchange insights, share real-world experiences, and address evolving cyber threats. Each session is designed to foster strategic dialogue, strengthen resilience, and elevate cybersecurity as a core driver of business value.

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.