The 10th CompTIA ANZ Channel Community meeting was held in Sydney on July 25th and the very first MeetUp was held in Melbourne on July 24th. Discussion topics at the Sydney meeting centred on cybersecurity as well as emerging opportunities for channel businesses. The guest speaker was Roger Heyes, business information security officer, Equifax A/NZ. Equifax suffered a high-profile data breach in the USA and UK last year, so it was a valuable reminder for the attendees regarding the importance of maintaining strong security from someone who experienced it first hand.
The rest of the meeting was mainly built around interactive sessions and group discussions. This included a game regarding notifiable data breaches (NBD) scheme compliance, with teams sharing different experiences and scenarios and discussing different roads and processes to take in the event of a breach.
During the afternoon, participants formed six smaller groups to discuss a number of key issues for the IT channel in Australia: advancing women in IT, engaging executive leaders, engaging millennials, emerging technologies, the ASD8 and how the CompTIA security toolkit can assist to improve an organisation’s security posture.These breakout sessions involved some vigorous discussion that has led to the development of practical outcomes… stay tuned to find out what these are.
The first Melbourne meetup was a reintroduction to CompTIA for Melbourne-based channel businesses and was extremely well recieved with 40 people in attendance. The meetup included a welcome and overview of CompTIA along with a panel session about better engaging millennials in the channel industry. We look forward to this being the first of many more MeetUps to come in both Melbourne and Sydney.