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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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Trend Micro Apex One offers lightweight, flexible protection for forestry firm Coillte

Trend Micro Apex One offers lightweight, flexible protection for forestry firm Coillte

OVERVIEW

Coillte is not your typical business. The 30-year-old forestry and land solutions company has an estate representing nearly 10% of Ireland’s land, extending to over 440,000 hectares. How it takes care of this land matters more today than ever, in terms of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. It’s also big business; the forestry sector contributes over €2 billion to the Irish economy every year.

Marc Walsh is the firm’s cloud and security architect, responsible for the entire technology infrastructure across on-premises and cloud environments. He looks after approximately 700 employee end-users, and a similar number of endpoints, split between servers, desktops, and PCs, along with a Citrix® estate of virtual desktops (VDI).

CHALLENGES

Like most mid-sized organisations, Coillte is a target for ransomware, data theft, business email compromise (BEC), and other remote cyberattacks which could cause far-reaching reputational and financial damage. Trend Micro blocked over 27.8 billion unique threats in the first half of 2020 alone, over 90% of which were email-borne. This highlights one of the biggest challenges for IT security bosses like Walsh; protecting the organisation’s soft underbelly (its users) from these threats without impacting their productivity.

Unfortunately, the incumbent AV provider Coillte was previously using was slowing down performance of the Citrix platform and therefore negatively affecting users in their day-to-day work. Given that Citrix touts an optimised performance and highly reliable end-user experience, even across low-bandwidth or high-latency connections, this was unacceptable. The search was on for a new provider.

WHY TREND

Walsh initially trialled several endpoint security solutions, carrying out a proofof- concept for a Citrix environment. Trend Micro Apex One came out on top for performance and was selected to run across the rest of the server estate, and then eventually all of the company’s laptop and desktop clients.

Trend Micro Apex One offers protection from all known and unknown threats on PC endpoints, Macs, and VDIs, from a single solution. Even better, it does this via an architecture that uses endpoint resources more effectively to outperform the competition on CPU and network utilisation.

In addition, Trend Micro Apex One offers:

XGen™ protection for cross-generational threat defence, including behavioural analysis, high-fidelity machine learning, app control, web and file reputation, and command and control (C&C) blocking
Virtual patching to protect against known and unknown vulnerabilities
Centralised visibility and control via Trend Micro Control Manager™
Sensitive data protection via endpoint encryption, integrated DLP, and device control
Threat detection and response via integration with Trend Micro™ XDR

"Trend Micro Apex One has really helped us during lockdown in a work-from-home scenario, as we have endpoints updating from the cloud directly and via a central console."

Marc Walsh - Cloud and Security Architect, Coillte

RESULTS

Whilst migrating Trend Micro Apex One over to the firm’s hundreds of servers and endpoints, Walsh was presented with another challenge. COVID-19 lockdowns forced all of Coillte’s employees to work from home from company PCs and laptops. Fortunately, Trend Micro Apex One handled this shift in strides thanks to its cloud architecture.

“We’ve changed dramatically from a situation where we were having to switch off functionality in our previous security software, just to keep things running, to having full coverage from Trend Micro,” says Walsh.

“Trend Micro Apex One has really helped us during lockdown in a work-from-home scenario, as we have endpoints updating from the cloud directly and via a central console.”

Walsh has been so impressed with the performance and capability of Trend Micro Apex One that he’s now looking at Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ for enhanced server protection across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments.

"Trend Micro is very forward thinking with regards to its product roadmap. I see a lot of innovation, so we will probably look at integrating more security products in the future."

Marc Walsh - Cloud and Security Architect, Coillte

Technologies

Apex One™

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.