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Belgium 9-6-26 Invitation Only Virtual english
Data availability keeps growing, but decision-making often feels slower. Every function builds its own dashboards, metrics multiply, and reports begin to contradict each other. What was meant to improve transparency now creates confusion. The problem is not access to data but alignment on interpretation. When information becomes noise, confidence in reporting collapses. People hesitate to act, functions challenge each other’s numbers, and trust in analytics erodes. The challenge lies in restoring clarity: deciding which metrics matter, who owns them, and how reporting connects back to action. Let’s discuss how to simplify information flows, define consistent metrics, and reconnect dashboards with decision-making. How ownership, cadence, and shared understanding bring alignment back. A closed conversation on rebuilding confidence in data, where clarity replaces overload and information once again supports action.
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Belgium 10-6-26 Invitation Only Physical english
In the middle of the night, 200 miles from the coast, the alarm sounds. The "Man Overboard" cry isn't just about a person in the water; it’s the ultimate test of a crew’s preparation, psychological grit, and split-second communication. For the modern European CIO, the "Man Overboard" moment happens in the data centre, the boardroom, or the headlines. When the system fails, the pressure doesn't just sit on the servers; it sits on you. Join CIONET for an exclusive VIP evening at the coast, a deep dive into the Human and Digital Anatomy of a Crisis. We will explore why some leaders thrive under the crushing weight of a "Black Swan" event while others capsize, and how data serves as the steady keel that keeps the ship upright.
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Belgium 12-6-26 Invitation Only Physical english
AI started small: a few pilots, some dashboards, a couple of chatbots. But then it spread, quickly. Now every department wants a model, every vendor adds “AI-powered” to their pitch, and every regulator is asking about risk and transparency. Governance suddenly went from a nice idea to a full-time job. Scaling governance is harder than launching AI. Policies look great on slides, but in practice, ownership blurs and enforcement stalls. Central control slows things down, while local freedom invites risk. Everyone agrees AI should be safe and ethical, but no one agrees on who signs off when something goes wrong, all leading to AIs living as permanent PoCs. So how do you scale oversight without creating bureaucracy? How do you distribute responsibility between IT, business, and compliance? And what controls actually hold up when AI keeps changing after deployment? Let’s explore how organisations make governance part of daily operations, not an afterthought. A closed conversation for those trying to keep AI credible, compliant, and under control while it spreads across the enterprise.
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June 9, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english
Data availability keeps growing, but decision-making often feels slower. Every function builds its own dashboards, metrics multiply, and reports begin to contradict each other. What was meant to improve transparency now creates confusion. The problem is not access to data but alignment on interpretation.
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June 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english
AI started small: a few pilots, some dashboards, a couple of chatbots. But then it spread, quickly. Now every department wants a model, every vendor adds “AI-powered” to their pitch, and every regulator is asking about risk and transparency. Governance suddenly went from a nice idea to a full-time job.
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June 18, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english
Becoming event-driven sounds like the logical next step: real-time visibility, faster response, tighter integration. The promise is appealing, no? But turning that vision into reality is another story. Where do you start, with technology, operating model, or mindset?
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CIONET Trailblazer: CISO: The Shift from Prevention to Resilience: Turning Visibility into Execution
Published on: January 28, 2026 @ 9:48 AM
CIONET Trailblazer: AI Transformation: Bridging the Cultural Divide to Achieve Competitive Advantage
Published on: December 17, 2025 @ 9:16 AM
Airbnb Optimizes Usage and Costs by Using Savings Plans and Actionable Cost Data on AWS
To help it achieve its goals, Airbnb looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud provider, for data and infrastructure solutions. Using support from AWS and multiple AWS services, Airbnb developed strategies to manage capacity, optimize storage and compute capacity, and build a custom cost and usage data tool. The solutions help Airbnb reduce costs, deliver actionable business metrics, and pursue data-informed efficiency projects across its teams.
Opportunity | Architecting Cost Efficiency to Grow Sustainably
Airbnb’s journey to facilitating connection and community through travel began in 2007 when its first two hosts—and founders—welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home. Since then, the company’s hosts have welcomed over one billion total guest arrivals, with listings across more than 220 countries and regions.
From its early days as a company, Airbnb has powered its business using cloud services from AWS—a strategy that supports its rapidly expanding workloads as well as its need for agile compute and storage solutions. The company decided to invest in transforming its data and usage strategy on AWS. Because Airbnb operations involve hundreds of services and an agile technical culture, the company needed a strategic, centralized, and relatively frictionless approach to leaner purchasing.
Early in Airbnb’s journey, the company used a cost allocation visualization engine, AWS Cost Explorer, which has an easy-to-use interface that helps customers visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. Later, to make use of its internal data infrastructure and extend the cost visualization capabilities of its data warehousing stack, Airbnb took advantage of data from the AWS Cost & Usage Report, which contains a comprehensive set of AWS cost and usage data and is available at an hourly, daily, or monthly level of granularity, as well as at the management or member account level.
"Using Savings Plans has been a significant improvement to Airbnb’s cloud management process. It’s helped reduce our operational workload while also driving meaningful cost savings for our business.”
Ari Siegel
Senior Finance Manager, Airbnb
Solution | Driving Cost Efficiency Using Insights and Pricing Solutions
Relying on its data warehouse, Airbnb uses the AWS Cost & Usage Report to run a custom pipeline that produces a dynamic view of Airbnb’s cost data and facilitates analytics. Airbnb’s pipeline ingests cost and usage files from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. To process files, Airbnb uses Amazon EMR, a cloud big data environment for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools, making it possible for developers to run big data applications and petabyte-scale data analytics faster. Airbnb uses its pipeline to discount and amortize the data and then further customize it to support analytics and produce actionable insights and metrics.
To save on its use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Airbnb became an early adopter of Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances in exchange for a specific usage commitment. Airbnb migrated its Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to Savings Plans and discontinued its On-Demand Instance usage, resulting in cost savings. “Using Savings Plans has been a significant improvement to Airbnb’s cloud management process. It’s helped reduce our operational workload while also driving meaningful cost savings for our business,” says Ari Siegel, senior finance manager at Airbnb.
Airbnb also manages and saves on storage costs using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (S3 Intelligent-Tiering), a cloud storage class that delivers automatic cost savings by moving objects between four access tiers when access patterns change. By using S3 Intelligent-Tiering to manage storage locations for objects used by Airbnb’s data warehouse, Airbnb reduced storage costs by approximately 27 percent. Additionally, for replicated data stored for backup, the company uses Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes—a range of storage classes that users can choose from based on the data access, resiliency, and cost requirements of their workloads. Airbnb relies on the AWS Cost & Usage Report for hourly insights into data storage spending on Amazon S3.
Airbnb also manages costs within its logging infrastructure using Amazon OpenSearch Service, which makes it easy to perform interactive log analytics, near-real-time application monitoring, website searches, and more. To help lower costs, Airbnb employed UltraWarm storage for Amazon OpenSearch Service, which provides a cost-effective way to store large amounts of read-only data on Amazon OpenSearch Service. The solution contributed to a 60 percent reduction in Airbnb’s Amazon OpenSearch Service costs.
Outcome | Maturing Operations and Empowering Teams
Airbnb’s finance and technology teams employed a broad range of AWS resources to build cloud efficiency and optimize operations. To work toward data-driven purchasing, the teams also expanded their consultation and engagement using AWS. And by delivering process and visibility improvements, the company helped empower individuals and teams to adopt cost management goals.
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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.
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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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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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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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