Belgium 25-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
As AI shapes our future, the time is now to address and correct its inherent biases. Join leading female voices in tech as we explore how to undo past mistakes, champion neutrality, and feed AI systems with inclusive, unbiased data. This conference is a call to action for female leaders in AI and tech to ensure the next generation of intelligent systems reflects fairness, diversity, and equity. Together, let’s set things right and redefine the future of AI.
Read MoreBelgium 25-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
On 25th September, during the Red Hat Summit: Connect 2025 in Brussels, CIONET is hosting an exclusive, invitation-only round table for leading CIOs, CTOs, and digital leaders. While the Summit offers a broad programme, this CIONET session is a separate, distinct event, conducted in its own dedicated room with private catering, ensuring a focused and confidential peer-to-peer discussion. This round table will delve into why certain cloud-native techniques offer undeniable benefits, irrespective of where your applications are deployed, be it on-premise, in a hyperscale cloud, or a hybrid environment. Even outside public clouds, these modern, modular architectures consistently deliver increased agility, enhanced scalability, and quicker time-to-market. The real power behind these advantages lies in automation. When done properly, automation significantly boosts team efficiency, improves system quality, and drastically cuts risks from slow systems or downtime. However, achieving truly effective automation comes with its own set of challenges, which we'll address head-on. Key Discussion Points Include: "No-Regret" Cloud-Native Pillars: We'll try to pinpoint essential techniques every organisation should adopt, such as microservices architecture, containerisation (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), API-first design, stateless application design, and immutable infrastructure. Why are these crucial for modern applications, no matter the deployment location? Strategic Vendor Lock-in: How to judiciously manage vendor lock-in. For new innovations and applications with a relatively short life expectancy, leveraging the latest unique features of a hyperscale cloud might be beneficial. For long-lived applications (expected to be live for decades), the focus might shift to limiting exposure by utilising generally available technologies. Automation Anywhere: How can organisations effectively implement automation strategies to unlock the full potential of cloud-native initiatives across diverse infrastructures? What are the biggest hurdles, and how are leaders overcoming them? This CIONET round table offers a unique and intimate setting for digital leaders to gain critical insights, exchange perspectives, and shape the strategic path towards application modernisation that truly offers no regrets.
Read MoreBelgium 30-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english
Everyone has technical debt. The question is what to do with it. Refactor now? Wait for the next feature? Build on it and hope it holds? If you’re tired of debating whether to clean up or move on, this session helps you frame the debt conversation in a way that supports both speed and stability.
Read MoreSeptember 30, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Everyone has technical debt. The question is what to do with it. Refactor now? Wait for the next feature? Build on it and hope it holds? If you’re tired of debating whether to clean up or move on, this session helps you frame the debt conversation in a way that supports both speed and stability.
Read MoreOctober 2, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Architecture doesn’t happen in diagrams. It happens in minds, seasoned, curious, sharp minds that understand how the pieces fit. But who’s shaping these minds? Who’s growing the next generation of digital architects? If you’re responsible for complex systems, and for the people designing them, this session is for you.
Read MoreOctober 14, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Agile delivery often collides with inflexible infrastructures. One team wants to release weekly. Another is waiting six months for a new test environment. Sounds familiar? If your infra team is tired of being the bottleneck, and your devs are tired of waiting, this session opens a path forward.
Read MoreBurns & McDonnell reduces costs by 30% by following AWS well-architected framework best practices
Reduces costs by 30% by following AWS well-architected framework best practices
OVERVIEW
Consulting solutions firm Burns & McDonnell may be well over a century old, but its adoption of cloud infrastructure for both customer and internal use cases shows that it is focused on the future. The firm has been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) since the early 2010s. But by 2019, it wanted better visibility into its cloud practices to tighten security and identify cost savings through more efficient use of AWS services.
Burns & McDonnell turned to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which helps organizations review the state of their workloads and compare them to the latest AWS architectural best practices. To better use this framework, Burns & McDonnell worked alongside AWS Advanced Technology Partner Trend Micro, which provides security services for organizations that are building in the cloud. By using Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity (Conformity), Burns & McDonnell obtained a full report containing cloud security recommendations and opportunities for cost efficiency in just 20 minutes. Conformity is an AWS Well-Architected Partner Solution that uses AWS Well-Architected APIs to automate much of the risk discovery process when a company runs an infrastructure review. By using Conformity and adopting the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Burns & McDonnell has seen significant benefits, including a 50 percent reduction in mean time to resolution using the database to remediate cloud service misconfigurations. It has also reduced costs by 30 percent year over year.
"We saved about 30 percent of our overall AWS bill in the first week by taking action. We drastically reduced waste by identifying whether any instances were overprovisioned."
Jason Cradit
Principal Cloud Architect, 1898 & Co.,
a subdivision of Burns & McDonnell
THE SOLUTION
Flipping the Old-School Information Technology Mentality on Its Head
Founded in 1898 and 100 percent owned by employees, Burns & McDonnell is an engineering, architecture, construction, environmental, and consulting solutions firm based in Kansas City, Missouri. Its 1898 & Co. subdivision builds and implements digital solutions for customers, often using AWS. In 2019, the newly formed 1898 & Co. recruited Jason Cradit as principal cloud architect to enhance its cloud architecture following his AWS re:Invent 2019 presentation on how older businesses can use the cloud to differentiate and build products.
Cradit’s job was to maximize the agility and performance benefits that Burns & McDonnell could gain from using cloud services. “We were already using the cloud, but we wanted to improve our governance framework around it,” Cradit says. “We were treating cloud and AWS services like on-premises servers and networks, controlling access and using some highly regimented processes. I wanted to flip that on its head.” Cradit believed that using the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Conformity together would enable Burns & McDonnell to gain visibility into security risks and inefficiencies within the cloud environment and perform better by filling those gaps. In addition, he hoped it would free employees to innovate without the fear of committing security breaches or creating cost inefficiencies.
Reducing Costs and Mean Time to Resolution
When Cradit signed Burns & McDonnell up for a Conformity trial, he received a full report with cloud security recommendations and opportunities for cost efficiency in just 20 minutes, rather than waiting days for the results. To generate data-rich reports, Conformity scans an organization’s cloud infrastructure and scores it against approximately 800 best practices, including the design principles outlined in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This approach enables customers to evaluate their architecture based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. Conformity rapidly sorts the results according to the risk level of each misconfiguration.
Every recommendation in the report links to Conformity’s knowledge base, which describes how to remediate it using the AWS Management Console—a web interface where users can manage their AWS accounts—or command line interface. Conformity customers also get frequent updates on new configuration checks within the application and new cloud services best practices.
Burns & McDonnell immediately used the visibility and contextual insights Conformity produced. “We saved about 30 percent of our overall AWS bill in the first week by taking action,” says Cradit. “We drastically reduced waste by identifying whether any instances were overprovisioned.” By using Conformity to better adhere to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Burns & McDonnell has reduced its AWS bill by 30 percent year over year. In addition, it’s seen a 50 percent reduction in mean time to resolution when using Conformity’s knowledge base and step-by-step guides to implement recommendations.
Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Conformity in tandem has given Burns & McDonnell freedom to innovate and gain new customers by saving time and money. “When we save money, we can spend it elsewhere and explore new things. That helped us win a large utility contract because we were able to reuse our funds to help that customer,” says Cradit. “Likewise, by building efficiencies into our practice, we have more time to explore. We don’t have to worry about micromanaging our infrastructure because we’ve delegated that to Conformity.” In addition, Cradit says sharing Burns & McDonnell’s cloud assessment reports with customers provides transparency into its cloud environment, giving customers peace of mind. Using Conformity also helps Burns & McDonnell comply with many regulatory requirements, such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection standards that energy and utility customers must adhere to.
Developers at Burns & McDonnell have more freedom to innovate because of the guardrails Conformity provides. The application has also been useful for training purposes. “The daily active user count has gone up,” says Cradit. “More people can build without the worry of a data breach or similar fears. For people who don’t have a lot of experience, it provides a great educational mechanism because when you want to resolve an issue, it walks you through the step-by-step procedure to get you there. One team member just passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate test, and he attributes a lot of that to using Conformity.”
Achieving More through Enhanced Visibility
Looking toward the future, Burns & McDonnell plans to further embrace cloud computing by architecting a cloud center of excellence. “In the last year, we’ve used AWS to determine how to build data warehouses more efficiently or ingest Internet of Things data and the like,” says Cradit. Burns & McDonnell also wants to help its energy and utility customers achieve more sustainable solutions by using AWS services for efficient, agile performance.
After experiencing the cost-saving and security-enhancing results of using the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Conformity together, Cradit recommends the solution to any business seeking better visibility into its cloud infrastructure. “By using the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that Conformity automates, you’re going to save money,” he says. “No matter how good you are, this solution will show you that you can do more.”
Founded in 1898 and 100 percent owned by employees, Burns & McDonnell is an engineering, architecture, construction, environmental, and consulting solutions firm based in Kansas City, Missouri.
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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?
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreDécouvrez 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 !
Read MoreCIONET 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.
Read MoreWould you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!
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