Technology Decisions

Threat modelling is hardly new for organisations with a mature, defence-in-depth approach to cybersecurity. It has long been a cornerstone of preventative security, helping businesses identify and address weaknesses before they can be exploited. For security teams, the value lies in moving from reacting to incidents to anticipating them.

The sharp pace and significant scale of enterprise AI deployments has redefined data risk. In the initial phase of deployment, organisations focused on preventing data loss when employees use AI tools (upstream activity), but the risk is no longer confined to outbound traffic. Insights from the Netskope ‘Threat Labs Report: Australia & New Zealand 2026’ show rapid growth in data security incidents caused by increased agentic AI activity among organisations in the ANZ region.

Systems integrator Brennan has launched a managed innovation capability designed to help Australian organisations transform business problems and ideas into practical outcomes. The Brennan Innovation Foundry has been designed to act as an efficient way to identify, test, deploy and scale innovations. The solution combines idea capture and assessment to help organisations prioritise opportunities using criteria including strategic value, expected return and effort.

Splunk AI features are now available on-premises with the release of Cisco AI POD for Splunk, the newest addition to Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. As AI agents take on more of the work inside the enterprise, the biggest barrier to adoption isn’t capability — it’s confidence. Customers need to trust that AI is secure, governed and worth the cost before they let it run at scale.

It took only a couple of years, but LLMs have officially hit commodity status. Previously, leveraging a large language model (LLM) might have given a business a competitive advantage. Today, it is merely the price of entry. When everyone is using models from open-source libraries, tapping into a hyperscaler’s APIs or leveraging frontier models, the competitive differentiation evaporates. In fact, I’ve recently noticed a maturation in the market.

Data and AI platform Cloudera has partnered with AI lab Mistral to bring sovereign AI-powered intelligence capabilities to enterprise data. The collaboration will combine Mistral’s frontier AI models and capabilities with the Cloudera hybrid data and AI platform to allow enterprises to securely build, customise and run AI models using their own private data. Enabling inferencing to be run privately will remove the need for enterprises to expose sensitive data.

Application security company F5 has launched a tool for providing organisations with visibility and control into the use of AI by their employees. F5 Workforce AI security is an agentless solution for providing organisations with visibility and policy control into workforce AI activity, including the actions taken by AI agents on users’ behalf.

In June 2026, the Australian Signals Directorate and Five Eyes Alliance warned that frontier AI is accelerating the speed, scale and sophistication of cyber threats faster than most organisations are prepared for. With the potential for operational disruption, as well as financial loss and reputational damage, the message is clear: cyber resilience is now a core business risk, not just an IT issue — and organisational leaders are being urged to act now.

Australia's most senior cyber defence agency has delivered a candid warning to executives and board members. The next generation of artificial intelligence will not simply help businesses work faster, but will also help cyber criminals attack faster. The Australian Signals Directorate's (ASD) new guidance on frontier AI signals a shift in how executives should think about cyber risk.

Australia’s technology sector may be looking to the next generation to build its future, but new research suggests an old workplace culture problem is meeting industry entrants at the door and risking their desire to build a career within it.