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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership. Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.

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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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August 5, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI Act – praktyka stosowania na rynku polskim

AI Act – dyrektywa unijna regulująca wiele zasad wykorzystania AI w modelach biznesowych- już obowiązuje na polskim rynki. Ciekawe są prawdziwe i realne przypadki jej stosowania. Spójrzmy na temat od strony regulacyjnej, czyli prawnej. Ale zobaczmy praktykę aktywnej w temacie kancelarii prawnej. Zaprosiliśmy mecenaskę Aleksandrę Maciejewicz z kancelarii Lawmore, która od dłuższego czasu jest niezwykle aktywna i praktykuje w tym temacie. Poznamy podstawę prawną, praktyczne case’y i opis sytuacji oczami prawdziwego praktyka.

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August 6, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

DORA: wszystko, co chcielibyście wiedzieć, a baliście się zapytać

Michał Kulesza, adwokat, partner w departamencie technologicznym kancelarii Rymarz Zdort Maruta i szef zespołu regulacji ICT, przeprowadzi nas przez kluczowe wątki rozporządzenia i zmierzy się z pytaniami zgłoszonymi przez uczestników. Omówimy zarówno krytyczne aspekty na początku wdrożeń, jak i dostrajanie zmian na poziomie organizacyjnym i strategicznym. Masz konkretny temat, który warto poruszyć? Zgłoś go w trakcie rejestracji. Zamiast czytać między wierszami DORA – porozmawiajmy o tym wprost.

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August 7, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Automated Systems Testing

Duże tempo developmentu i dokonywanych zmian wymaga nowej klasy testowania. Jakość systemów obserwowana na produkcji będzie pochodną skuteczności tego procesu. Duże nadzieje wiążemy z platformami wspierającymi testowanie i opartymi na AI. Sesja ta pokaże, gdzie jesteśmy w poszukiwaniu takich rozwiązań i gdzie ewaluuje myślenie szefów testów i ich rozwiązania organizacyjne.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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Leicester’s De Montfort University maximises email and server protection with Trend Micro

Maximises email and server protection with Trend Micro

OVERVIEW

De Montfort University is amongst the 200 best young universities in the world and 97.3 percent of its graduates from summer 2017 entered the workforce or went on to further study. The university also achieved the highest rating—gold—in the government’s 2017 Teaching Excellence Framework, judged to have “outstanding” teaching, learning, and outcomes for students. More recently, it has completed a £136 million transformation of its campus.

Unified Communications Manager, Jon O’Grady, works in the university’s IT and media services, managing its 25,000 students and 3,000 staff who use Microsoft® Office 365® for instant access to productivity apps.

 
 

CHALLENGES

Like many universities, De Montfort is an attractive target for financially motivated cybercrime groups as well as state-sponsored attackers. This is due to the large numbers of users and the personal and financial data, not to mention the sensitive IP the institution holds in the form of ground-breaking research from its students and faculty.

Chinese state hackers have attacked USCanadian and Australian universities in the past, while Iranian spies have been blamed for attacks on their UK counterparts. Meanwhile, a report from 2017 claimed that nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of UK universities have been victim of phishing attacks; even those running GCHQ-certified information security courses. Phishing isn’t just targeted at staff and students to elicit personal and financial information, it can also be the first stage in a more sophisticated attempt to breach security systems, exploit server vulnerabilities, and steal large data stores.

Balancing open access for large numbers of mobile users while keeping threats at bay can be a challenge for university IT security teams, and while crucial teaching and learning resources can now be found online, such networks also act as an entry point for ransomware attacks.

 
 

WHY TREND

Aware of the rising threats facing his organization, Jon O’Grady knew he needed to improve cybersecurity. The university’s IT team undertook a gap analysis, using the National Cyber Security Centre’s popular 10 Steps to Cybersecurity guidance document. Among other things, it calls for anti-malware defences to be established across organizations and recommends a patch update mechanism for all systems to maximise baseline security.

After running a tendering process via its reseller, Software Box, De Montfort University chose Trend Micro in June 2018 to provide malware protection and traffic monitoring for its servers with the award-winning Trend Micro Deep Security platform. Trend Micro was also chosen to replace the existing desktop AV solution with the Smart Protection Complete Suite; providing security via Office Scan for desktops, Hosted Email Security; a cloud hosted Email Gateway, and Cloud App Security for Office 365.

 

"Our account manager is always there for queries. The relationship is one of the best we have with the major vendors.:

Jon O’Grady - United Communications Manager of De Montfort University

 
 

SOLUTION

Smart Protection Complete Suite integrates security across multiple layers of an organization’s IT infrastructure—endpoint, mobile, email, and web—with centralised management and flexible deployment for on-premises and cloud environments. The Trend Micro XGen™ security solution combines layers of cross-generational threat protection techniques, applying the right tool at the right time for cross-layer detection and response without false positives. It includes high-fidelity machine learning, behavioural analysis, web and file reputation, app control and more. It’s all joined up with connected threat defence, which means each layer shares intelligence on suspicious network activity with the next.

Cloud App Security enhances in-built Office 365 security with data loss prevention (DLP), advanced sandbox analysis, and more to stop threats—including phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and ransomware.

Hosted Email Security is a zero maintenance offering that stops email-based malware in the cloud before it even has a chance to hit the corporate network. Protects Microsoft® Exchange®, Office 365, and other hosted email solutions.

Deep Security has kept Trend Micro as the number one server security vendor every year since 2009, according to IDC1. It features the same industry-leading XGen approach, for powerful protection with minimal impact on performance across physical, virtual, and hybrid cloud environments. Centralised management, automated, hostbased protection and proactive defense via intrusion prevention and virtual patching helps accelerate compliance, stop attacks, and minimise disruption.

 

"We used basic Office 365 protection for years but had been affected by multiple phishing attacks on our students, so we made the decision to enhance our security in this area."

Jon O’Grady - United Communications Manager of De Montfort University

 
 

RESULTS

Jon O’Grady and his team have been enormously impressed with the capabilities offered by Trend Micro at the server and email security layer. He says Trend Micro Hosted Email Security has delivered a “massive improvement” over the previous solution, blocking four million suspicious emails each month. Its success led to the university’s further investment in Trend Micro Cloud App Security to offer additional protection to its student population.

“We used basic Office 365 protection for years but had been affected by multiple phishing attacks on our students, so we made the decision to enhance our security in this area,” says Jon O’Grady. On the server side, Jon O’Grady is pleased with Deep Security’s ease of deployment, high protection rate, usability, and optimised performance. “The intrusion prevention system (IPS) on the server estate has managed to prevent threats on our legacy servers, which is a great benefit as we couldn’t patch these due to their age. IPS allowed us to mitigate risk until we decommissioned them,” he says.

De Montfort’s IT team purchased through its reseller but it maintains a fantastic direct relationship with Trend Micro. “Our account manager is always there for queries—he comes on site, checks everything is fine, and offers technical assistance where necessary,” Jon O’Grady concludes. “The relationship is one of the best we have with the major vendors.”

Partners

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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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?

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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.

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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 !

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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.

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Check out our latest news

Testimonials

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Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
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Group CIO
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Chief Information Officer
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Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
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Stef Schampaert
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Thomas Kessler
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pascal pauwels
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Koen Segers
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Group IT Directo
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Thierry Driesens
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Managing Director
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Director General Digital Transformation
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Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
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Directeur général
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Head of IT European Markets
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Team

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Luc Hendrikx
CEO
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Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
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Founder - MD
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Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
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Tribe Master
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Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
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Program Manager
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Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
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Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
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Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
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Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
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Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!