null

Belgium 21-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

From Victim to Victor: Cyber resilience is a means, providing Business Continuity the goal

In an era where every outage, audit, and cyberattack is a test of organisational survival, resilience has become the new currency of trust. While traditional perimeter security with: firewalls, intrusion detection, and scanners, remains essential, it is no longer a sufficient guarantee against modern threats that bypass these layers to penetrate your core systems. Today, enterprises require security and continuity that are built-in, not bolted-on. This CIONET roundtable focuses on the shift from reactive disaster recovery to proactive Business Continuity. Together with experts from HPE Zerto, we will explore how organisations can transform their recovery strategies into seamless continuity models.

Belgium 23-4-26 Country Members Physical & Virtual english

CIOFEST BELGIUM: Leadership in the Agentic Era

AI is no longer confined to supporting human tasks. We are entering the agentic era, where autonomous systems act on behalf of people and organisations. These agents can gather information, make decisions, negotiate terms, and even complete transactions. The implications extend well beyond technology; they touch the very foundations of business models, governance, and leadership. For CIOs and their peers, the rise of “machine customers” and autonomous partners poses new questions: Market impact: How do you compete and create value when some customers and suppliers are machines? Governance: What trust, compliance, and accountability structures are needed when AI acts independently in financial, procurement, or customer-facing processes? Leadership: How should CIOs guide their organisations in redefining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making when agents take over parts of the value chain?Business strategy: What opportunities emerge for new revenue models, platforms, and ecosystems shaped by autonomous interaction? This session shifts the focus from the mechanics of AI agents to the decisions that will shape leadership in the next decade. It is a call for CIOs to prepare for a future where relationships, markets, and strategies are no longer limited to human-to-human interactions, but also extend to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.

Belgium 29-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Building Future-Ready Application Ecosystems in the Age of Intelligent Automation

This CIONET workshop is a collaborative deep-dive into the practicalities of"rewiring the building" while it’s still occupied. Drawing onKyndryl’s deep heritage in mission-critical infrastructure and their latestresearch, we will dismantle the "hidden costs" of legacyenvironments. The conversation will focus on the transition from static,monolithic structures to composable architectures that allow intelligent agentsto operate seamlessly across hybrid landscapes.

April 2, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Taming the SaaS Sprawl: Tracking spend, ownership, and usage before it slips out of control

SaaS gave business units freedom: quick onboarding, no infrastructure, and instant results. But over time, that freedom turned into fragmentation. Each team now buys, renews, and configures its own stack. HR has one platform, finance has another, and marketing probably has ten. The invoices keep coming, usage keeps dropping, and no one is sure who’s accountable for what.

May 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Product-Centric IT 2.0: Blending product and project thinking

Everyone says they’ve gone product-centric. In reality, most organisations live in a hybrid world where projects, products, and platforms overlap. Teams manage releases while still chasing deadlines, and governance still thinks in milestones rather than outcomes. The shift is underway, but the mindset hasn’t caught up.

May 19, 2026 Squad Session 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.

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

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.

Technologies

AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR)

CIONET Business Circles

Cyber Circle

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.

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.