Our Speakers

Jamil Farshchi is EVP and Chief Information Security Officer of Equifax (NYSE: EFX). Farshchi joined Equifax in the aftermath of one of the most consequential data breaches in history. During his tenure, he led an unprecedented $1.5 billion transformation and has built what is regarded as one of the most advanced, effective, and transparent cybersecurity and privacy programs in business today.

Prior to Equifax, Farshchi was Chief Information Security Officer of The Home Depot, Chief Information Security Officer of Time Warner, Vice President of Global Information Security for Visa, Chief Information Security Officer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Deputy Chief Information Assurance Officer of NASA.

Farshchi serves on the Board of Directors for UKG, is a Strategic Advisor for the FBI and serves on the Board of Directors for the National Technology Security Coalition. He was named a Top Voice in Technology and Innovation by LinkedIn.

Claudine Ogilvie is the former Chief Information Officer for Jetstar and Non Executive Director with Youi Insurance. She has a deep understanding of strategy, risk, technology and innovation; and expertise in governance, transformation, marketing and Asia markets. Prior to Jetstar Claudine was CIO for Ridley Corporation; she managed KPMG’s Consumer and Industrial Markets business. She also held product management, sales operations and marketing roles for International SOS (Australia, NZ, PNG and Pacific Islands), British Petroleum (BP Australia) and Unipath (France).

Claudine is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD). Claudine is an alumni of the Australia-ASEAN Emerging Leaders Program Kuala Lumpur, and an Asialink Leaders Program alumni (Melbourne University). She has a Bachelor of Business from the University of Technology Sydney, Australia (B.Bus) and a Diploma of Business Management from the Ecole Supérieur de Commerce Reims, France (Dip.Mgnt).

Based in Sydney, Australia, Yvette is a senior executive cyber leader. Most recently she was the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in residence in APJ for the cyber and compliance company Proofpoint. She also spent almost 5 years at the Jetstar Group of Airline companies (Jetstar Aus/NZ, Jetstar Asia, Jetstar Japan and Jetstar Vietnam). Prior to Jetstar she was the CISO at Australia’s largest freight and logistic company Asciano, as well as having built up the security function at Atlassian before they went to IPO.  She is a Fellow of the Australian Information Security Association.

As an Executive Director within KordaMentha, he leads efforts to provide advisory and support to organisations seeking to manage the ever-changing risk that is cyber security. Augmenting the firms forensic, financial tech, corporate advisory and restructuring services with a suite of cybersecurity related risk advisory, incident response, business continuity and operational resilience services, his team listens to the challenges being faced by organisations and government and co-creates solutions which increase resiliency, reduce risk, optimise performance and organisational efficiency.

As a seasoned cybersecurity professional with a passion for innovation and a keen understanding of the ever-evolving threat landscape, Andrew Philp brings a wealth of 25 years of knowledge and expertise to the field.

For the past 10 years at Trend Micro, Andrew has held various leadership roles, all focused on assisting enterprises and government agencies to understand, manage and reduce their cyber security risk posture. Andrew currently leads Trend Micro Platform strategy for ANZ enterprise business, driving a combined Trend, Customer and External team strategy to drive benefits and time to value from the platform.

Andrew is a passionate advocate for engaging with CISOs and CIOs. Understanding that effective cybersecurity goes beyond technology, he actively connects with industry leaders, fostering a collaborative environment where knowledge is shared, and collective defence strategies are strengthened.

Andrew has been involved in many industry speaking engagements nationally and internationally, in the IT and security sector, sharing a wide range of knowledge from thought leadership insight, customer use cases, right through to technical solution expertise.

Matt Berry is a senior pre-sales engineer at Abnormal Security and specialist in security and networking. Matt’s 20+ years in IT cover both pre- and post-sales roles across leading IT vendors, service providers, and customers.

Prior to his role at Abnormal Security, Matt was working with customers across Asia Pacific on their cloud security & SASE requirements at Palo Alto Networks, and was the lead pre-sales engineer at VMWare for both their SD-WAN and SDN data centre solutions; where he also served as field-CTO in the networking and security business unit, presenting regularly at various events and conferences. Matt is the co-author of ‘SD-WAN 1:1 The What, Why and How’.

Brett Winterford is the APJ CSO at Okta advising policy makers, business leaders and fellow security professionals on evolving threats and opportunities to improve their security posture. Prior to Okta, Brett held senior leadership roles in the security teams at Symantec and Commonwealth Bank. Yet, he’s best known for his work as a security journalist. In 2020, he was the founding editor of the Srsly Risky Biz newsletter, a companion to the Risky Business podcast, providing the cybersecurity, policy, defence and intelligence communities with a weekly brief of the news that shapes cyber policy.

Prior to working as a security practitioner, Brett was the editor-in-chief of ITnews Australia and has contributed extensively to ZDNet, the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Clive is the Deputy Chief Information Security Officer and has over 20 years’ experience in cyber security risk management, engineering and operations. Clive leads critical customer-facing security capabilities including the Telstra Security Operation Centres and the Defence Engagement Security Team. Clive was previously the CISO for Telstra’s Defence Engagement Team and also managed a secure ops and incident response centre.

Prior to joining Telstra, Clive worked for the Australian Government and served in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Clive is an engineering graduate of RMIT and holds an MBA in Technology Management.

James is the ARC Solutions Engineer for ANZ at Diligent, specializing in digitization of manual workflows and boosting the output of teams with limited resources through the use of Diligent technology.

Before joining Diligent, James worked in Governance, Risk and Compliance Advisory at KPMG, as well as Digital Risk & Compliance at Accenture. His diverse background working with large organizations to optimize and automate their R&C practice allows him to work hand in hand with Diligent’s customers to design and tailor our products for their specific needs.

Matt Preswick is the Enterprise Solutions Engineer for Wiz in APJ, with experience in network, email and cloud security at leading security vendors in EMEA and APAC. Before joining Wiz, he lead operations at a Sydney based network analytics startup before returning to Cloud security with Wiz.

Matt is passionate about developing scalable and actionable security practices within APJs largest organisations.

With over 20 years experience in the IT and telecommunications sectors managing teams in all sector SMB/Mid-Market/Corporate/Enterprise and government across all verticals. I have a commercially focused and results-orientated management style with the skills and expertise needed to expand revenue and client account capabilities for regional, national and international accounts. I have a strong record of successfully building and managing sales teams. I believe a collaborative approach will more often then not achieve the best outcomes. I find the most enjoyable part of you role is coaching, developing and mentoring sales people and customers to achieve their goals.

Dominic Lovell is the Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for Akamai Technologies across Australia and New Zealand. Dominic has a strong technical background in web development, cloud and cybersecurity.  

Prior to Akamai he ran the development team for one of Australia’s largest ecommerce brands. 

Jeremy Rowley leads the company’s product development teams, driving innovation on the company’s certificate management platform as well as its delivery of leading solutions for protecting web servers, signing digital code and documents. Rowley also leads a team providing authentication, encryption and integrity solutions for the IoT, secure data exchange of medical records and other sensitive data, blockchain and post-quantum cryptography, among other emerging sectors. Rowley also represents DigiCert’s interests within various industry standards bodies and has authored several industry standards now in use. As part of DigiCert’s vision to lead its industry toward better and more trusted practices, Rowley actively participates in groups such as the CA/Browser Forum, IETF, Mozilla Forum, NIST and ICANN. Rowley was a key participant in drafting the CA/Browser Forum’s EV Guidelines, Baseline Requirements, and Network Security Guidelines, and he continues to draft new policy and guidelines today.  

Prior to joining DigiCert, Rowley worked as corporate counsel for another large Certificate Authority, helped build programs to achieve efficiencies within law firms, and served as chief software architect for a global chemical software group. Rowley earned a J.D. from Brigham Young University as well as M.S. and B.S. of Science, Chemical Engineering at the same institution. Rowley is a member of the Utah Bar and currently serves as president of the Utah Bar Association’s Cyberlaw division.  

Asanga Wanigatunga is the Regional Vice President for the ANZ region at Snyk based out of Sydney. He leads the ANZ region and is responsible for growing Snyk’s business including establishing key routes to market. Snyk has seen significant growth in the ANZ region and in this role, Asanga will further spearhead the adoption of Snyk’s Cloud Native Application Security platform by ensuring that enterprises of all sizes are able to secure their application development processes.

Asanga’s most recent prior positions were serving as the Vice President for Cloud & Service Providers for the APJ region for Veeam Software for 3.5 years where he build up the business in the region across all key markets. Prior to that he served as the director for end-user computing cloud services for APJ at VMware where he spent the last three years developing the end-user computing cloud ecosystem across the region with service providers and telecommunications companies.

He successfully grew this line of business at a rate of more than 130 percent year-on-year and was instrumental in constructing cloud-led multi-million-dollar competitive bids with system integrators and system outsourcers (SISOs) and mobile operators in the region. His tenures at VMware lasted seven years and prior to that, he was a technology specialist for endpoint management at Symantec. Asanga holds a Bachelors of Computer Science.

Lawrence Crowther is a diverse technology leader building high performance teams with a career spanning two decades and four continents. From day one he has been helping companies transform the way they build software by challenging and disrupting ineffective ways of working.

He has been designing and implementing enterprise and open source systems within industry and on the vendor side focusing on cloud, mobility, big data and AppSec. With a proven track record working with successful startups and global leaders has fuelled a passion for technology and innovation.

Maryam Bechtel is the Chief Information Security Officer at AGL Energy. With over 17 years of vast experience in information security, Maryam is responsible for the Cyber protection of one of Australia’s most critical infrastructures, essential for the nation’s energy supply and ensuring over 4 million customers energy and telco needs are met.

Maryam’s career has consisted of two phases: ten years of consulting with Deutsche Telekom and Deloitte, working with C-levels and executives in large international companies to define an overarching and achievable cyber security strategy. Her consulting engagements led her to gain industry wide experience across various cyber security domains in multiple countries such as Germany, UK, USA and Australia.

She was named the “AISA Cyber Security Professional of the Year” by Australian Information Security Association in 2022 for her outstanding leadership, integrity, mentoring and coaching in the industry.

Anna has been working for over 25 years in a variety of roles, primarily with government and in national security/cyber security related areas. Her introduction to cybersecurity was in 2011 when she was in the Cyber Command in the Serious Organised Crime Agency (UK) as the UK started to take the cyber threat much more seriously. Those years were spent helping understand the cyber threat landscape more fully, engaging in disruption planning and activities and building up capability and capacity across the agencies.

She has spent a considerable amount of time in intelligence agencies, law enforcement and other various bits of government in the UK and Australia, and is really enjoying the Higher Education sector which she joined February 2021 when she joined UTS as CISO.

Chris Klingenspor is Senior Vice President of International Security and Security Risk for Equifax. He is responsible for leading all regional security programs, manages the relationship between the security team and Equifax’s global business operations, and manages Security M&A due diligence and integration.

Prior to Equifax, Chris worked for Visa, a global leader in digital payments. There he served as Vice President and Head of Information, Governance, Risk, and Compliance, managing IT and cybersecurity initiatives for Visa and its subsidiaries.

Chris previously worked for IBM, one of the largest technology companies in the world. At IBM, he managed IT security, controls, and compliance programs for the company and its new business ventures.

Tom has worked with researchers and research institutes to bring innovation and invention in the Advanced Materials & Manufacturing sector to market.

Previously a Member of the South Australian Parliament, he served as Minister for Science and Minister for Manufacturing, Innovation & Trade. Tom is respected by both sides of politics as straight shooting, direct and honest. His key strengths include strategy, communication, an understanding of science and technology and the future use of these to effect meaningful economic change.

His focus on outcomes allows him to evaluate what is important and connect the key elements of a process to achieve rapid adoption and stakeholder agreement.

Byron is a highly experienced technology and business journalist, editor, corporate writer, and event producer.

Prior to joining Adapt, he was the editor-in-chief at CIO Australia and associate editor at CSO Australia. He also created and led the well-known CIO50 awards program in Australia and The CIO Show podcast.

Byron creates valuable insights for our community of senior technology and business professionals that help them reach their organisational and professional goals. He has a passion for uncovering stories about the careers and personal philosophies of Australia’s top technology and digital executives.

When he is not working, Byron enjoys hot yoga, swimming, running, and spending time with his family.

As Director of Strategic Research at ADAPT Matt Boon, is responsible for directing and developing ADAPTs research content and positions. In his role at ADAPT Boon advises C-Suite executives across the end-user and technology provider landscape. Boon is also responsible for bringing together groups of C-Suite leaders to discuss and prepare for the myriad of challenges and opportunities they face.

ADAPT host’s numerous industry leading IT focused events annually and Boon is responsible for hosting, chairing and delivering ADAPT independent content and positions to help attendees make informed IT decisions.

Peter Hind has spent the last 25 years as an analyst and commentator on the ICT industry. He says his primary areas of interest are the potential of technology to transform the way organisations operate, the change management obstacles executives encounter in realising this potential and the tactics and techniques leaders have deployed to overcome these difficulties.

Peter now takes on multiple roles within ADAPT including the moderation of private events and roundtables, interviewing business executives about the strategies they are pursuing and assisting with the structuring of our delegate surveys and the interrogation and analysis of ADAPT’s treasure trove of end-user and C-level data

Jim is well known in the local market for delivering on his promise and his entire career has been spent connecting the right people at the right time in roles across Europe, China and Australia.

He founded ADAPT to deliver quality outcomes with integrity and since 2011, growth has been consistent. Jim is still positioned across sales and account management where he delivers innovative results and programs and leads by example.

He also runs entrepreneurial product development and the evolution and clear differentiated value of ADAPT’s offerings. As well as a NSW Small Business Excellence nomination, ADAPT were 55th in BRW’s 2014 Top 100 Start Ups – Jim’s 3rd time there – previously as Founder of Strategic Path, an award-winning ICT publisher, he steered the company to make the list in both 2009 and 2010.