The Cloud & IT Infrastructure Summit NSW 2026 brings together IT and cloud leaders to discuss cloud transformation, infrastructure modernization, security, and the future of enterprise technology in NSW.
Delegates
Speakers
Sessions
Connecting cloud and infrastructure leaders to shape the future of technology
The rapid evolution of cloud, AI and platform technologies is reshaping how organisations design, deliver and scale enterprise capability. The Cloud & IT Infrastructure Summit NSW brings together senior technology and cloud leaders to explore how modern IT infrastructure management and cloud strategies are enabling greater innovation, operational efficiency and agility across increasingly complex digital cloud environments.
Designed to foster practical insight-sharing among IT leadership summit professionals and technology leaders, the summit will examine how organisations are balancing performance, governance, cost and sovereignty considerations while evolving cloud service delivery and operating models to support modern enterprise demands, spanning data centers and infrastructure management solutions.
Across the day, IT leaders summit will explore the future of hybrid and multi-cloud architecture, cloud-enabled AI workloads, automation, infrastructure resilience and open-source innovation, alongside the practical challenges of disaster recovery planning, cyber threats, hardware, software and networking and opportunities shaping it infrastructure conference, cloud strategy, operations and enterprise architecture.
Meet our Speakers
Head - Infrastructure, Security & Operations
Head of Discipline (Information Technology) & Director, Women in AI for Social Good Lab
Professor
Head of IT Operations & Infrastructure
Senior Manager, DevSecOps
Engineering Director, SRE
Head of Cloud Services
Chief Information Officer
Featured Topics for the Day
View Agenda
8:30 am
Registration & Refreshments
9:00 am
Welcome Remarks
9:10 am
How Cloud is Reshaping Enterprise Technology Capability and Innovation Potential
Cloud enabling leaders to design and scale more complex, high-performance products
Shift to cloud-first and platform-based architectures changing how capabilities are designed and assembled
Greater leverage of cloud services, AI, and automation accelerating delivery and operational execution
Evolving multi-cloud environments requiring stronger governance, resilience, and cost discipline
Richard Malcolm
Head of Architecture
Allianz Retire+
Leonard Rajeev Rawat
Head of Infrastructure, Security & Operations
Harris Farm Markets
Artem Yakimenko
Engineering Director, SRE
CultureAmp
Dr. Yimeng Feng
Lecturer in Computing
Macquarie University
9:50 am
Compliance at the Speed of AI: Why Governance Is Becoming Your Infrastructure Bottleneck
AI is compressing infrastructure change cycles from weeks to minutes - but audit and compliance processes still operate on a quarterly cadence. Learn how AI is reshaping infrastructure as code delivery and how you can remove the governance bottleneck.
Nico Krüger
Senior Director, Sales Engineering
Perforce Software
10:10 am
Morning Tea & Networking
10:40 am
The “Painful Middle” of Transformation
Discuss the Learnings of the Ebbs & Flows of Migration
11:10 am
Architecting Resilient Infrastructure in the Age of Digital Sovereignty and Volatility
Leveraging open-source for portable AI workloads across on-prem, public cloud, and edge environments
Addressing regulation for data residency and sovereign capability through transparent, open-source infrastructure
Managing high compute costs via container management to optimise complex hardware
Adopting an "open-first" approach to enable rapid experimentation without compromising security and compliance
Richard Hawkes
Senior Manager, DevSecOps
ASX
Jason Sandery
Head of Cloud Services
Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Roberto Calero
Cloud Operations Manager
Blackwoods
Linton Burling
CRO
Sharon AI
11:50 am
The Next Wave of Optimisation: FinOps, Platform Engineering and Agentic Operations
Learn where cloud waste actually sits in 2026 — from proprietary database licensing and Kubernetes overprovisioning to AI inference growth — and how leading organisations are using agentic methods to reduce it continuously, not quarterly.
Explore a practical operating model for “Agent FinOps”, including how platform engineering, FinOps, and AI-driven operations converge to improve governance, reduce technical debt, and accelerate migration away from proprietary stacks.
Leigh Stillard
Director Cloud and Infrastructure
CGI
12:10 pm
Lunch & Networking
1:00 pm
Interactive Workshops
Scaling Cloud & IT Infrastructure with Open Source Databases: Benefits, Challenges, and Real-World Lessons
Beyond the Blindspot: Navigating Shadow IT and Shadow AI in the Modern Business
Pilot to Payoff: Developing your AI Strategy to Support Business Outcomes at Scale
When Things Break: Building Infrastructure That Can Fail Without Failing the Business
1:50 pm
The Great Cloud Repatriation Debate: Is cloud-first always fit-for purpose?
Defining the Right Hybrid Cloud Operating Model for Modern Architecture
Looking back: Re-architecting cloud infrastructure for more seamless operations
Multi-Cloud: A large enterprise luxury, or democratised strategy?
Can on-prem infrastructure ever match cloud-driven innovation?
Luke Palmer
Head of IT Operations & Infrastructure
Fantastic Furniture
Nicolas Parfait
Chief Information Officer
Avenue Bank
Professor Niusha Shafiabady
Head of Discipline (Information Technology) & Director, Women in AI for Social Good Lab
ACU
2:30 pm
Afternoon Tea & Networking
2:50 pm
The Trust Crisis: Securing Infrastructure in an Age of AI-Driven Deception
How AI is changing the threat landscape - from synthetic identities and automated attacks to increasingly sophisticated social engineering targeting people, platforms and infrastructure.
Why trust is becoming an infrastructure challenge - as organisations rely on increasingly interconnected cloud environments, identities, devices and autonomous systems, how do you know what, and who, to trust?
What digital resilience looks like in an AI-driven world - from identity and access controls to zero-trust architecture, observability and automated response, how can organisations build infrastructure that can withstand increasingly sophisticated threats?
Richard Buckland
Professor
UNSW
