Explore every episode of the podcast The iTnews Podcast

Hello and welcome to the iTnews Podcast. Our guest this week is Mark Potter, the chief information officer at Optus.

Optus has stood up a unified data platform that brings data from across a number of repositories into an Azure-based ‘lakehouse’ environment. Mark walks us through this large program of work, which is continuing, but he starts where the iTnews Podcast often does - discussing key priorities of the telco’s IT strategy.

This episode is brought to you by techpartner.news. Our sister channel publication CRN Australia is rebranding to techpartner.news on the first of April. Make sure you book mark techpartner.news in your browser, subscribe to the newsletter and register for our line up of events including Pipeline, the Impact Awards, Channel Meets, the MSP Index program and FAST 50.

Hello and Welcome to a brand new season of the iTnews Podcast. This week's episode is brought to you by Arctic Wolf and the State of Security Report. Stick around until the end to catch insights from Arctic Wolf’s Director of Engineering Steve Hunter on how AI is transforming cyber security—helping analysts cut through the noise, detect threats faster, and strengthen defences against evolving attacks.

But first, we have Endeavour Energy’s Information Security Manager Gijo Varghese. At the end of last year, Endeavour achieved ISO 27001:2022 certification for its Information Security Management System (ISMS) - a milestone in its ongoing execution of a 2024-2029 cyber security strategy. We start the episode with Gijo describing his domain function and the strategic pillars that the organisation is working to.

A boot camp run ahead of CyberCon this week aims to build future CISOs’ peer networks and business communication - skills that could help them make the transition into a security executive role.

It’s the second year the RSA Conference CISO Boot Camp has been held in Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Information Security Association (AISA), the organiser of CyberCon.

This year the boot camp’s co-chairs are longtime Thales Australia and New Zealand CISO Ben Doyle and Cyber Resilience Group founding partner and former Endeavour Drinks CISO Grant McKechnie.

Speaking to the iTnews Podcast, Doyle said Australia was the first country outside of the United States that the boot camp had been run.

This week we speak with Chris Crozier, CIO at Defence.

This week we're revisiting a discussion from last season — we'll be back on schedule with on October 14!

Senior Manager of Technology, Jeff Campbell

Horizon Power has completed a large-scale migration of applications and workloads from its data centres to a private cloud run by Macquarie Cloud Services. The shift to private cloud was for several reasons. The WA government wants agencies and owned companies to have more of a cloud mindset. In parallel, the government has set ambitious targets to reduce whole-of-government carbon emissions, and exiting its data centre was seen as a key way for Horizon Power’s Technology team to do its part. The private cloud choice was also partially for security reasons - Horizon Power has obligations under the Security of Critical Infrastructure or SOCI Act to contend with. Horizon Power is now set up to achieve some future-facing and data-driven ambitions, leveraging other cloud-based services.

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The latest episode of the iTnews Podcast hear from ANZ Banking Group’s CISO, Dr. Maria Milosavljevic, as she discusses ANZ's security strategy, focusing on embedding security, building resilience, and driving business transformation.  

The iTnews Podcast is brought to you by Fortinet and the 2024 State Of Security Report.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

Vote Now for the iTnews Podcast in the Listeners' Choice Award at the Australian Podcast Awards! VOTE HERE

This week's episode brought to you by Stellar Cyber and the  2024 State of Security report.

NBN Co has launched a new five-year security strategy to align with the Australian government's cyber security initiatives, while reinforcing the role of security as a business enabler. Chief Security Officer Darren Kane, in a recent iTnews Podcast interview, discussed how NBN Co’s strategy integrates physical and cyber security into a unified model. The strategy emphasises the quantification of security risks in financial terms to enhance communication with executives and the board.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

As part of the 2024 iTnews State of Data report, iTnews speaks with Ashley Taylor, Global Voice of Customer Lead at Flight Centre.

This week's episode brought to you by NRI

Checkout the inaugural State of Data report. 

We explore the trends that are driving data analytics through to the latest strategies for how data is stored and secured, and focus on the rapidly maturing disciplines of data governance and AI governance.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

iTnews Associate Editor Eleanor Dickinson interviews David Griffiths, the Chief Information Security Officer of Northern Beaches Council. Griffiths shares insights on developing and implementing a cohesive security strategy for the council, emphasizing the importance of understanding information control, applying appropriate security measures, and building a roadmap for the future. He also discusses his transition from state to local government, highlighting the unique challenges of managing security across a diverse range of services and the importance of leveraging external partners and tools to enhance cybersecurity capabilities.

iTnews Podcast sponsored by Lacework and the 2024 State of Security Report

Stay tuned until the end to hear Anthony Rees, Field CTO at Lacework, discuss the importance of security hygiene, cloud posture, and code security, along with the need for visibility and prioritizing internet-facing assets to protect critical data and infrastructure.

In our latest iTnews podcast episode, we dive into the transformative
journey of Torrens University, a digital-first institution that has grown
from zero to nearly 20,000 students in just a decade.
Eoghan Hogan, former transformation director of Torrens University,
discusses the university’s commitment to online education, their innovative
digital learning model, and the significant transformation initiatives
undertaken to stay ahead in the competitive higher education sector.

Discover the Fusion5 approach to cloud migration with insights from Kris Jackson, General Manager for Cloud Infrastructure and Security, on achieving reduced costs, improved security, and stronger governance through strategic planning and effective management.
To learn more about maximising the value of your cloud migration. Please go to https://www.fusion5.com.au/

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

As part of the 2024 iTnews State of Security report, iTnews speaks with Jeroen Buwalda, Group Executive, Transformation, Technology & Operations at Colonial First State.     

This episode of the iTnews podcast brought to you by Brennan.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

As part of the 2024 iTnews State of Security report, iTnews speaks with Paul Russell, CTO at Gumtree Group . 

This episode of the iTnews podcast brought to you by Interactive.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

As part of the 2024 iTnews State of Data report, iTnews speaks with Jared Woodruff,  Head of AI Engineering at Lander & Rogers.

iTnews is excited to announce the launch of the inaugural State of Data report on Thursday, June 20th, at a special Data Forum Breakfast at the NextDC Sydney Data Centre.

Readers are invited to register their interest here:

iTnews will host panel discussions with CIOs, CDOs, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists, covering topics from the report, such as Data Security, Data Analytics/AI, Data Storage, and Data Governance.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

As part of the 2024 iTnews State of Security report, iTnews speaks with Marcelo Dantas, Chief Information Officer at Automic Group.

This episode of the iTnews podcast brought to you by Jamf.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

 As part of the 2024 iTnews State of Security report, iTnews speaks with  Sandro Bucchianeri, Group Chief Security Officer at NAB.

This episode of the iTnews podcast brought to you by Mimecast.

We love to hear from our readers and advertisers, so please get in touch and let the friendly iTnews team help with your enquiry.

This week iTnews speaks with Robert Lopez, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer at Norths Collective.

iTnews speaks with Sherrie Killiby, Executive Director, Strategy & Engagement at Transport for NSW.

This week we speak with Sandip Kumar, who’s the Executive Director of Transformation, about what digital transformation looks like in Australian healthcare, and his direct operations.

iTnews speaks with SBS CTO Darren Farnham about the media organisation's tech strategy, strategic pillars, and a recent CMS overhaul.

This is a repeat of one of our most popular episodes — we'll have the rest of Season 3 for you soon!

Our guest this week is John Cox, the CTO of Coles Group. There’s a lot of interesting things happening at Coles, including an in-progress shift to an events-based architecture. This has wide-ranging use cases, from in-store replenishment and reducing out-of-stocks on ecommerce orders, to anticipating customer service and listing next-best actions for team members. We also discuss the Group’s IT strategy, and why adoption of cloud services is not a specific strategic pillar.

This week, iTnews speaks with Douugh Founder and CEO Andy Taylor about the fintech's future plans — and how it intends to help bring financial education into its user experience.

iTnews speaks with Dale Hurley, Founder and Chief Digital Officer at Avenue Bank, one of Australia's newest banks about its current operations under a Restricted Authorised Deposit-taking Institution licence — and what the future holds. 

iTnews spoke with Westpac's CTO David Walker to learn more about the bank's recent AI coding experiment.

This week iTnews speaks with the leader of NAB's Technology & Enterprise Operations Leadership Team and acting CIO of Personal Bank Paul Norman. 

As Australia's largest online pet supply store, Pet Circle is investing heavily in technology, including most recently to support a trial of fully-owned last-mile delivery services in Perth, as well as in digital systems that make it easier to interface with courier partners elsewhere in Australia, and specifically to have more visibility into its supply chain. 

Some of this work has involved uplifting an existing Google Cloud Platform environment to track data on a “per customer order” basis. 

Behind the scenes, the company is also embracing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and automation to increase velocity and speed-to-value.

La Trobe University's Director of Data & Analytics Anthony Perera leads a data and analytics centre of excellence that brings together data, analytics and data science operations that previously existed as distributed “pockets” of capability within the university structure.It is driving a major three-phase program of work, the first phase of which - standing up an Azure-based enterprise data analytics platform, or EDAP - was completed last year. The focus through 2022 was on the second phase, around data governance. A third phase, planned for 2023, will see La Trobe University “turbocharge” the migration of clean, standardised datasets from across the institution into the EDAP.

Horizon Power has completed a large-scale migration of applications and workloads from its data centres to a private cloud run by Macquarie Cloud Services. The shift to private cloud was for several reasons.

The WA government wants agencies and owned companies to have more of a cloud mindset. In parallel, the government has set ambitious targets to reduce whole-of-government carbon emissions, and exiting its data centre was seen as a key way for Horizon Power’s Technology team to do its part.

The private cloud choice was also partially for security reasons - Horizon Power has obligations under the Security of Critical Infrastructure or SOCI Act to contend with. Horizon Power is now set up to achieve some future-facing and data-driven ambitions, leveraging other cloud-based services.

In this week’s episode of the iTnews Podcast, Police bank chief executive office Greg McKenna talks about the banks ongoing whole-of-bank transformation which has been on the path of renewal as customers increasingly seek digital channels.

Head of Information Security and IT, Elliot Colquhoun. Airwallex is an Australian finance unicorn ($1bn+ valuation), and Colquhoun runs its IT and information security operations. The company has spent the past two years overhauling its application landscape and upgrading computers - a 50/50 Windows/Mac end-user environment. One of the reasons to do this, however, is that Colquhoun believes the state of internal systems is a signal to developers and builders about the quality that should be built into customer-facing products. The idea is to set a high internal bar, which then gets reflected in the products. IT and infosec also makes itself available to product teams to provide input and guidance.

Executive Director of Information Systems & Technology, Hamish Cameron was a guest of the podcast back in mid-2021 when he outlined his ambitions for a mobile workforce transformation program, equipping 6000 sworn and non-sworn staff with a smartphone. Almost two years on, they are now in live pilot, and the podcast discusses device choice, applications developed and loaded, and UX efforts being run in parallel. Outside of the transformation, we also discuss IS&T’s efforts to transform its own operations so as to move from a service provider to a trusted advisor and influencer on technology matters to the broader SAPOL. This reflects the broader role that technology is playing in policing, and IS&T’s desire to have a front row seat strategically.

In this weeks episode we’re joined by Alex.Bank chief executive Simon Beitz. As Australia’s newest bank we’ll discuss future plans and how the bank ensures its technology foundations are capable of scale and instilling the right processes while keeping the customer at the forefront of its mission. We’ll also talk about the early days of sleeping on shed floors as team mapped out its digital banking journey.

Our guest this week is John Cox, the CTO of Coles Group. There’s a lot of interesting things happening at Coles, including an in-progress shift to an events-based architecture. This has wide-ranging use cases, from in-store replenishment and reducing out-of-stocks on ecommerce orders, to anticipating customer service and listing next-best actions for team members. We also discuss the Group’s IT strategy, and why adoption of cloud services is not a specific strategic pillar.

What does it take to set up the IT infrastructure at a zoo from scratch? It’s not something many IT managers will do, but Alonzo got the chance to, and shares a very different kind of startup story. This talks to the evolution from a one-person IT shop to the gradual build-up of resources and systems, and particularly how the zoo leant on technology partners to create innovative systems, from point-of-sale, to telecommunications, to accepting a wide variety of electronic payments. A specific case study in the episode also speaks to the zoo’s data analytics and BI environment, which is based on Azure and Power BI.

We begin this episode with a special message from editor-in-chief Ry Crozier.
We look forward to bringing you new episodes in 2023!

In this week’s episode of the iTnews Podcast, RBA chief information officer Stephen Smith describes the wide-ranging technology agenda and infrastructure currently being pursued by Australia’s central bank.

PEXA runs core platforms for e-conveyancing and financial settlements of property transactions in Australia. It also has a growing insights business, and is expanding internationally. Chief Technology Officer Eglantine Etiemble talks about some of the projects underway, from a “big program of change” around customer and employee experience, to the rearchitecting of PEXA’s backend around a modular and API-first driven approach. She also walks us through the company culture and what she looks for in new hires.

New episodes coming soon!

Register for the State of IT 2022 report: itnews.com.au/state-of-it-2022

Strandbags has re-platformed its Australian and New Zealand websites with Shopify Plus and a mix of plug-ins under what it is calling ‘Project Future’.

In this week’s iTnews podcast, CTO Stuart Freer and head of digital & data delivery Paul Erskine discuss the origin, status and next steps for Project Future, as well as a new set of transformations beyond it.

St Vincent’s Health Australia (SVHA) has set up a new enterprise-wide system to record, manage, and analyse data about incidents involving patients, clients, and residents. This includes falls, along with any safety hazards, across their hospitals, aged care facilities, and services nationwide.

Manager of Clinical Governance Informatics, Edel Murray, told the iTnews Podcast Team that the application called SVHA Riskman replaced five previous instances of a system formerly known as just ‘Riskman’.

Hansen Yuncken is using 3D modelling software to ‘walk’ customers through the sequencing of their construction projects, improving transparency and explainability of risks such as time delays.

In this week’s episode of the iTnews Podcast, Rexine Jones - who is both CFO and CIO of Hansen Yuncken - discusses the company’s use of Autodesk’s BIM 360 software.

She also details the lived experience and advantages of having finance and IT led by a single executive.

NEW EPISODE

Suncorp Group has set a target to exit owned or leased data centres by early 2024, with 90 percent of workloads destined for public cloud and 10 percent for a hybrid cloud environment hosted “in close proximity” to its chosen public cloud infrastructure.

That ambition is to run largely in the cloud, with applications either virtualised or containerised, with few exceptions.

New episodes coming soon!

Australian start-up Humanitix re-invests 100 percent of the profits from event ticket fees into education projects for disadvantaged kids.

The start-up had to transition its operations online when the pandemic hit, and has since expanded from its ticketing core into helping hard-hit event organisers run virtual events and - when borders reopen - safer in-person events.

New epissodes coming soon!

Cyber security has rocketed to the top of corporate risk registries in recent years. But few board members attain their place due to any deep subject matter expertise. 

In this week's CXO Challenge, we speak to Roger Sharp the founder of North Ridge Partners, and the chair of several large listed companies in the finance and travel sector in Australia. Sharp talks about the need to take an holistic approach to the subject. 

We also discuss the challenge generally for directors to stay on top of the topic of technology driven transformation in an age of rapid digital acceleration.

We'll be back with new episodes soon!

Original Description:

Travel insurer Cover-More Group cut 15 percent of its enterprise application portfolio as part of a global consolation of its IT operations at the height of the pandemic.

The ASX-listed company – which operates in 22 countries – juggled the project, which is ongoing, while putting out spot fires during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of the travel industry.

Speaking as part of the CXO Challenge services on The iTnews Podcast, global chief information officer Nicki Doble said the standardisation aimed to consolidate systems across the global brand.

We'll be back with a new episode soon!

Original description:

Deakin University has spent the past 18 months modernising its approach to software delivery, adopting standard CI/CD tooling and removing manual effort in order to get code into production faster.

In this week’s CXO Challenge on the iTnews podcast, director of software engineering Aaron Whitehand shares the university’s modernisation story so far, covering its adoption of DevOps practices, automation and standard tooling.

We'll return with new episodes soon!

Auswide Bank’s chief transformation officer Rebecca Stephens describes the multi-faceted transformation she was brought in to lead and run at the start of this year.

We'll be back with new episodes soon. For now we flash back to our discussion with Zip Co's former director of security and IT, Peter Robinson.

Original Description:

When Zip’s director of security and IT Peter Robinson joined the company two-and-a-half years ago, he was its only security staffer. 

The company - ASX-listed and a major player in the ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) boom - has scaled up rapidly in that time, growing from 100 people overall to over 1000.

The story of that scale-up, and the technology challenges it brought, is told in this week’s CXO Challenge interview on the iTnews podcast.