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.

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.

May 22, 2026 Squad Session 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?

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

Facilitating more effective collaboration for the NATO Standardisation Office

PwC’s AI-based solution enables the NSO to address its community more broadly to bring together divergent national views more easily.

Facilitating collaboration

The NATO Standardization Office (NSO) supports a diverse subject matter expert workforce, about 20,000 of whom are registered users on its website, where it provides the collaboration services that enable them to work together on about 1,400 NATO standardization documents that are used by about seven million professionals in 32 nations across the entire NATO alliance to protect a population of one billion. Maintaining this documentation was very labour intensive, as much was done manually. The custodian position also isn’t a full-time role, but a volunteer assignment. To see where artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to help NSO issued a request for proposal (RFP).

Looking to innovate

Explains Rob Trabucchi, Deputy Director, NSO, “We were looking to provide that volunteer part-time workforce with tools to help them make the most of all the information available to them in today's information age. While they have much more information available to make those documents better, at the same time, they can be flooded by that information. So, we needed tools like natural language processing and text analytics to help them manage it all, make the most of it and really make their jobs much more satisfying.”

Seeking reliability

When looking for a provider, NSO had some specific attributes in mind, namely, "someone who really had experience with AI tools and delivering those to a customer like us, an intergovernmental organisation,” Rob Trabucchi recalls. And he adds, we also wanted someone with “experience working with NATO, which would really help to accelerate the product, and third, and perhaps the most important, we were looking for reliability.”

“We had real two-way interaction and outside-the-box thinking with multiple people so we could have a broad interaction.”

Rob TrabucchiDeputy Director, NSO.

Broad interaction

In answer to the RFP, PwC suggested ways in which AI could help meet NSO’s needs and how the technology could best be implemented to be beneficial. We not only had the experience in working with NATO that the NSO was looking for, but could add in business insights based on our broad experience. Enthuses Rob Trabucchi, “There are three things that I really liked about the interactions that I had with the PwC team. The first was that we had very frequent meetings, which meant that we had short intense sprints. I understand that takes a lot more effort. The second thing that I liked about it was that we had real two-way interaction and outside-the-box thinking with multiple people from the team in each meeting, so we could have a good broad interaction. And finally, the team really invested a lot of effort, making sure that everything was in place throughout the deployment of the tool. That took some time to follow up and showed real dedication and reliability.”

Leading the way to the future

The project involved a lot of technical building blocks, including building a prototype to show how a chatbot could help work on the standards in scope and indicate where standards, and related standards, could be found. According to Rob Trabucchi, “the value of this project goes well beyond the NSO to the 20,000 plus workforce. It allowed us, as their primary service provider, to demonstrate to that we’re leading them into the future and providing them with modern services that directly address their needs. It also allowed us to learn from the feedback of our users and pick some of our most dedicated people, who can also be the most demanding, and really deliver a tool that allows them to teach us how to build the next generation of tools.”

Deep thought and good advice

Rob Trabucchi notes that NSO learned a lot from the project. “First of all, reaching out to the community was extremely valuable to us and I think we learned that we want to do more of that. We’d like to spread that out to more as we go forward to more users of diverse types. We also learned that we really have to plan ahead because NATO, as an organisation, is all about bringing together a really diverse set of national views, and that makes our decision making a very deliberate process, a consultative process, which takes time. The third thing we learned is that that consultative, deliberate process has to be balanced or somehow integrated with dynamic innovation, and that takes some real deep thought and good advice.”

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.