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Belgium 19-5-26 Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

The game has changed, clearly. Attackers have AI, defenders have AI, and both sides are learning faster than anyone expected, or maybe the attackers are just a bit faster. What used to take hours now happens in seconds, and detection windows close before alerts even appear. It’s adaptation beyond automation, and no one gets to sit still. But every promise of AI-driven defence comes with a price. The tools are expensive to train, maintain, and monitor. Mistakes cost more too. False positives drain teams, model drift hides real threats, and poisoned data turns protection into confusion. So now it’s not only about defending networks, it’s about defending the defenders themselves, from fatigue, blind trust, and automation gone wrong. So how do you keep visibility when both sides use the same weapons? How do you detect intent when patterns look human but aren’t? How do you justify cost when failure still happens, just faster? Let’s explore what happens when algorithms face each other on both sides of the firewall, and what new defences emerge when speed alone is no longer enough. A closed conversation about a future where cybersecurity becomes an AI vs AI battle, and humans still have to win.

Belgium 21-5-26 All Members Physical english

Replace, Wrap, or Rebuild? : Core modernization in financial services and insurance, without a full rewrite.

For banks, insurers, and other financial services leaders, core modernization is rarely a simple technology decision. The harder question is what to replace, what to wrap, what to rebuild selectively, and what to leave alone. This round table brings together senior peers to discuss how they are making those choices under real constraints: resilience, control, regulatory scrutiny, delivery speed, vendor dependency, and the risk of getting sequencing wrong. The conversation will focus on practical judgment, where modernization creates value, where it adds risk, and how to move forward without triggering another multi-year transformation cycle. A small-group discussion for leaders looking for clear decisions, credible trade-offs, and peer perspective.

Belgium 22-5-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

Every vendor swears their platform is open, flexible, and built for freedom. Then comes the renewal date. The price goes up, migration looks painful, and “strategic partnership” starts to feel more like dependency. Most organisations don’t get trapped overnight, they walk into it one contract at a time. Broadcom, anyone? We know lock-in isn’t only technical, it’s commercial, architectural, and even cultural. Once tools shape how teams work, switching becomes not only costly but politically impossible. So how do you manage dependency without losing leverage? What do you do when moving away costs more than staying? How do you negotiate from a position of weakness? And what governance models help prevent lock-in before it happens? Let’s share how to keep options open, make vendors compete without breaking partnerships, and find leverage even when it seems there’s none left. A closed conversation for those who’ve learned that freedom in IT is rarely free.

May 19, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

May 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

May 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

The Career Path of the Cloud Engineer: From system builder to strategic enabler of digital scale

The cloud engineer’s world keeps expanding. It started with provisioning and automation, but now it touches everything: resilience, security, cost, and even business continuity. What used to be a back-end function has become one of the most visible roles in digital operations. Yet with that visibility comes pressure: constant evolution, constant firefighting, and very little time to step back and ask, “Where is this career actually going?”

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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™

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