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Hello and welcome to the iTnews Podcast

Our guest on the podcast this fortnight is James Ng, the Chief Information Security Officer for Insignia Financial.

Insignia Financial is perhaps better known by its component parts, which include the old IOOF, as well as the ANZ Wealth and MLC Wealth divisions that it acquired from ANZ and NAB respectively.

It’s spent the past three years consolidating its security estate and removing duplicated effort and inefficiency from security operations processes. James starts by taking us through the current security strategy, as well as the next one under development.

This episode is brought to you by the iTnews Cloud Covered Breakfast Summit, powered by Microsoft and Dicker Data. Join senior technology leaders from across Western Australia on 31 March at QT Perth for a practical discussion on modernising workflows into public cloud, reducing architectural risk, and understanding where edge fits into long-term cloud strategy, with insights grounded in real-world experience.

Hello and welcome to the iTnews Podcast. Our guest this week is Sallie Moore-Wood, the director of governance and information systems at Waratah-Wynyard Council and Circular Head Council in Tasmania’s north-west.

The two councils share personnel and a digital transformation strategy and roadmap, which covers information systems, cybersecurity and other bodies of work.

We asked Sallie to drill into particularly the cybersecurity aspects of the transformation, into some of the challenges faced so far and how these have been addressed and overcome.

Hello and welcome to a new season of the iTnews Podcast. We begin this year by speaking to Aussie Broadband’s Head of Cloud and SRE Ben O’Shea.

Eagle-eyed iTnews readers and listeners might remember Ben’s appearance at Cisco Live in 2024, when he revealed work that was underway to build a new cloud platform for Aussie Broadband’s own internal use, and to retire older virtualisation and containerisation platforms.

In this episode, we hear where that cloud platform is at a year on, we discuss Ben’s role expansion to cover SRE, and we also hear about a recent change to the company’s backup tooling.

In this episode, iTnews host Jennifer O’Brien is joined by Stephanie Barnett, Vice President of Presales and Interim GM for Asia Pacific & Japan at Okta. Together they unpack why identity has moved from an authentication project to a board-level business layer, and why “attackers don’t break in – they log in”.

You will hear how organisations across Australia, New Zealand and the wider APJ region are responding to Essential Eight-driven identity requirements, the rise of non-human identities and AI agents, and the growing challenge of fragmented identity estates. Stephanie also shares what CISOs should be telling their boards in 2026, including practical steps to reduce risk while enabling productivity and secure automation.

Discover how private 5G is reshaping data-driven mining. Ian Ross, Head of Enterprise, Australia and New Zealand at Ericsson explains why fast, stable onsite connectivity is now essential for safer, more productive operations, from teleremote dozers to real-time digital-twins powered by smart sensors. Learn how 5G overcomes the limits of Wi-Fi and 4G and unlocks the next wave of mining innovation.

This episode, from late last year, sees ANZ's chief information security officer Dr Maria Milosavljevic talk all things security. We'll be back with a new episode soon.

Our guest this fortnight is Rob Ison, the chief information officer of Vocus. Rob takes us through the telco’s IT strategy, as well as its agile ways of working program. He also discusses infrastructure modernisation and an ongoing simplification effort that aims to optimise how customers experience and interact with Vocus’ services.

Our guest this week is Trent Dawson, the Chief information officer of Civil construction firm Symal.

Trent walks us through the past four years of IT transformation at Symal, which debuted on the ASX at the end of 2024.

He also discusses the company’s burgeoning DevOps practice and AI capabilities, which tap into services and tools from Microsoft Azure.