Jen Thomson has more than 20 years’ experience advising IT Vendors, senior IT, and business execs on their digital business optimization and transformation strategies. She leads European Research for Accelerated App Delivery, Cloud, and Services. Her core goal is to drive synergies and growth across these research areas, with a central focus on thought leadership.

She specializes in providing insights on the investment strategies and decisions of European enterprises as they transition to modern application architectures. Her research explores app dev and delivery capabilities required to operate in a digital economy, and how this impacts enterprise organizational structures, culture, processes, tools, and skill sets. She leads the Future of Digital Innovation research for IDC Europe, exploring software innovation strategies and what this means in terms of end-user strategies, investment priorities, software sourcing, and KPIs. Thomson’s core research also explores enterprise maturity and strategies towards enterprise scale and empowered DevOps.

She is responsible for the execution of a broad range of consulting and advisory projects. As IDC’s European expert on application development and delivery strategies, Thomson is an experienced public speaker and regularly presents at conferences and IDC partner and end-user events.

She started her career at Compaq Computer EMEA as a senior research analyst. She has a bachelor’s degree in international business with German from Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom) and Pforzheim Fachhochschule (Germany).

Carla Arend is a senior program director with the European software and infrastructure research team, and heads up IDC’s European cloud research. Arend provides industry clients with key insight into market dynamics, vendor activities, and end-user adoption trends in the European cloud market. As part of her research, she covers topics such as how European organizations are adopting cloud, how cloud drivers and inhibitors are evolving, cloud management, cloud security, data management in the cloud, IoT and cloud, AI and cloud, Devops and cloud, as well as GDPR impact on cloud and cloud code of conduct.

In addition to syndicated research, Arend has worked on many custom consulting projects identifying opportunities in the European cloud market and has authored white papers on subjects such as cloud management, cloud security, data management in the cloud.

Arend is regularly asked to speak at industry events, strategy workshops, sales kick-offs and training, partner events, and end-user events.

Arend holds a BA in business administration from University of Mannheim and an MSc in business administration and management of technology from Copenhagen Business School, in addition to course work at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok.

Ralf Helkenberg is a research manager with the European security research team, responsible for leading IDC’s European Privacy and Data Security research practice. His core research coverage includes the impacts of data protection regulation, such as the GDPR on the technology sector, with key insight into market dynamics, vendor activities in privacy workflow management and data security (including data discovery, DLP, encryption), end-user trends and the future of digital trust.

Prior to IDC, he worked as a B2B marketer within a variety of industries, including IT Governance, Risk & Compliance where he built-up a product and marketing programme for GDPR compliance solutions.

Ralf holds a BA in European Business Administration from Middlesex University, London.

As senior research manager for IDC’s European Security group, Romain has a specific focus on network security and the security technologies linked to the extended enterprise such as IoT, Edge and IT/OT convergence. He closely monitors the development, evolution, and penetration of these technologies and the approaches vendors are taking to stimulate adoption both at channel and end-user level.

Romain manages the IDC security appliance market tracker for the Europe, which provides market size, vendor share and forecasts for network security products such as unified threat management (UTM), firewall, IDP and content management (web and Messaging) appliances.

Romain also co-leads the European Future of Operations practice, looking at the shift in operational mindset for European organizations to a market-driven outlook that is leveraging digital capabilities to build a resilient organization. Romain has a specific interest in the role of security as business enabler for IT/OT integrations strategies.

Romain joined IDC from a manufacturing industry company, where he specialized in market research consultancy. Within this role he handled go-to-market projects for a variety of products and vendors, focusing on the French and Italian markets.

Glen Hymers Dip CSMP®, Cert HE, CIS LI, M_o_R, GDPR-P, MInstLM

Glen has spent his working life involved in Policing and Security, he fell into Policing of a fashion joining the RAF Police in 1998 when he discovered University was expensive and as such he was running out of funds.

During his time in the RAFP Glen was employed all aspects of policing finally settling into the role of Counter Intelligence, responsible for carrying out Counter Espionage and Counter Terrorism duties for the RAF at home and abroad in some notable locations some you’d want to go on holiday to but most you wouldn’t. Glen parted ways with the RAF as a regular in 2012 as part of the Strategic Defence Review of that year and began his journey into the private sector with stops at Fujitsu Defence and National Security as their Head of Operational Security & Risk Management, before moving to Sopra Steria as Head of Operational Security for Government accounts.

In 2016 he moved to the Prince’s Trust taking up the role of Chief Security and Risk Officer as well as being appointed as the DPO in 2017. After a successful tenure at The Prince’s Trust during which he introduced both GDPR and Cyber Essentials Plus at the organisation he moved to Save The Children International where he is currently employed as the Global Chief Information Security Officer and Head of Data Protection. In his spare time Glen is still an active member of the RAF Reserve having completed two operational tours abroad one in 2014 to Afghanistan as part of Op HERRICK and again in 2018 to Cyprus as part of Op SHADER and most lately within the UK where he was employed on Op RESCRIPT the UK Government response to COVID-19 during which he was a Mobile Testing Unit Commander running testing sites in the East of England.

When he is not doing this he is an advocate for all things Cyber Security and especially getting the basics right, as from the basics comes good security so to that end he has now joined the South East Cyber Resilience Centre as one of its founding board members in September 2020.

Eri Kejser is the CISO of FORCE Technology and brings with her 15 years of experience working her way through IT from doing front-end development, to backend, to now securing enterprise infrastructure & cloud systems. Having successfully traversed several aspects of a business through the eyes of an end user and into leadership, the primary focus for Eri is to drive compliance and risk management into people, processes and technology while maintaining an innovative drive and enabling cutting-edge technologies. In her current role, she is busy building security into the business strategies for space technology, power-to-X, maritime, energy infrastructure.

Worked in the IT Security area more than 20 years. In and for major financial companies within banking and insurance sector in the nordics. Now head of information security in SOS International A/S, a company that helps people. Visionary – with a pragmatic and risk based approach.

Toks is responsible for the global delivery of information security at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. He has over 20 years’ experience working in security, technology and privacy, across a number of industries.

Toks is an experienced and strategic business risk leader. He has a particular passion for team development, business strategy, risk-based metrics and enterprise security culture.

Toks has contributed to the business and technology community through information sharing, groups, speaking engagements and multi-industry networking. As strong supporter of education and schools, he has provided support in areas of security, data protection, user awareness and cloud transformation.

Tom Stewart BSc CISSP CISM CEH currently works as Head of Information Security for Ryanair, where over the past six years he has built and managed a highly skilled Information Security Team which supports the Ryanair Airline Group. Prior to that Tom worked as a Systems Engineer/Security Officer on some of the key IT systems for the business. He has been an IT Security professional with over 25 years’ experience gained from working in the Aviation, financial and manufacturing sectors. Tom has a strong technical background in Linux/Unix, Data Base Administration and IT Security.

Jorge Fernandes is the CISO, DPO and Director of the Internal Control Office at CMVM, the Portuguese securities supervisor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and several certifications in information security and data protection.

Jorge has more than 20 years of professional experience in Information Security in the financial services sector. His experience as CISO includes the European Securities and Markets Authority and the Council of Europe Development Bank. He is currently a member of several European regulatory groups regarding cybersecurity, operational resilience and the digitalization of the financial sector.

Antonio, with almost two decades of work experience in Cyber Security, has been CISO at Orkla since 2017 and now SVP Information Security. He has a background in engineering and consulting, and is passionate about security, food and the work of the mind. From consultancy he has experience in cyber and information risk management as well as crisis preparedness, penetration testing and security operations. His industry experience varies from public to private sector, mainly media & telecommunications, health, finance.