Sydney Data Protection & Security Summit 2025

Step into the reality of a major cyber incident with someone who has navigated the storm. This session offers firsthand insights into the true impact of a breach, focusing on:

• Practical experiences and lessons learned
• The profound people impact
• Navigating the challenging aftermath  

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This session will explore how businesses can safeguard sensitive data in the AI era. Attendees will learn about strategies to reduce data risk across operations, navigate the evolving landscape of data protection regulations, and stay ahead of emerging threats.

• Understanding the impact of AI on data security and emerging cyber threats
• Strategies for reducing data risk and protecting sensitive information
• Leveraging advanced data security solutions to stay ahead of threats
• Building a proactive security posture to protect against future challenges

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As data spreads across clouds, devices, apps, and AI pipelines, identifying and protecting it has never been more complex. This session brings together security, governance, privacy, and technology leaders to uncover hidden data, reduce exposure, and align teams to reduce risk without stalling innovation.

• What are the biggest security risks from data sprawl, and how do you prioritise them?
• How do you align IT, privacy, and governance teams on shared data protection goals?
• Where does shadow data most often accumulate, and why is it often missed?
• How can organisations effectively discover, classify, and monitor data across disparate environments?

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An interactive session where attendees collaborate to handle a simulated data breach, focusing on immediate response, communication, and mitigation strategies.

Understanding how data moves, changes, and is accessed across complex systems is critical—but nearly impossible to do manually. In this session, a software partner shares how they helped an enterprise client implement AI-driven observability to surface patterns, flag anomalies, and make smarter security and compliance decisions.

• Deployed AI to baseline normal data access and usage across environments
• Identified risky behavior and anomalies without relying on static rules
• Streamlined incident triage through contextual, real-time data insights
• Enabled continuous compliance by linking AI observability to policy enforcement

Practical insights into deploying Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools and policies to safeguard data in a distributed workforce.

AI is moving fast — but are your guardrails keeping up? In this session, we’ll hear from a leader who’s building AI governance frameworks inside a complex enterprise. They’ll share:

• What governance looks like beyond policy documents
• The realities of managing AI risk in the wild
• Lessons learned from putting principles into practice

Select a topic of discussion and engage in an interactive roundtable discussion with a group of your like-minded peers.

As enterprise data environments grow more distributed, maintaining strong data hygiene is essential to preventing exposure and ensuring compliance. This session offers practical approaches for identifying weak points, reinforcing governance, and embedding secure data practices into day-to-day operations.

• Identify and address common breakdowns in data hygiene practices
• Strengthen access controls to minimise overexposure across environments
• Automate routine governance to reduce manual oversight gaps
• Embed data protection into systems, workflows, and culture

In this session, we’ll take a live pulse of the room on six big-picture questions. The results will drive a candid, expert-led discussion on what they reveal about where we are — and where we’re heading.

• In today’s environment, what should be the primary purpose of the data protection function?
• What’s the most effective way to influence company-wide behaviour change around data protection?
• Is AI the silver bullet for protecting our data moving forward?
• What's the biggest driver behind current data protection investments?
• Where should security leaders should spend more time and money?

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