I recently had a chat with Hannah Betts about national data sovereignty and AI sovereignty. I’m sceptical about much of the discussion about this topic. Mostly because there is very little evidence that it is a real (rather than theoretical) problem, and because most of the responses confuse the physical location of the data with the jurisdiction that applies to that data. But recent events with Anthropic and Fable have forced me to rethink this.
Tag: Cyber-security
Axenic partners with Cyberheed to deliver smarter risk and compliance solutions
A new partnership focused on better outcomes
Compliance work has always come with a pile of manual administrative grunt work. We’ve been chipping away at that, and now we’re going further. We’ve teamed up with CyberHeed, who build AI tools for governance, risk and compliance.
Axenic’s 2025 year in review: The cyber risks that caught everyone’s attention
It has been a noisy year on the New Zealand cybersecurity front. Between regulatory shifts, the “always-on” threat of ransomware, and the scramble to secure remote workforces, finding clear, actionable advice hasn’t always been easy.
At Axenic, we’ve spent the last 12 months sifting through the cybersecurity headlines to send you only what matters. We didn’t just want to add to your inbox; we wanted to arm you with “plain English” clarity.
Now that the dust is settling on 2025, we’ve gone back through our data and in this blog we take a look at what actually grabbed your attention.
Axenic Lightning Talks Series – March 2025
A few years back, we kicked off our own internal lightning talks—our way of having a good old geek-out over cybersecurity topics that get our Governance, Risk, Assurance, and Compliance brains buzzing. Think of it as a slightly more structured version of those deep and meaningful yarns we used to have around the office coffee machine… before COVID did its thing and made us all experts in online meetings awkwardness instead.
These blogposts are not written by one team member. The content is provided to you by the whole Axenic Team – or whomever attended on the day.
2021’s Cyber Security Events: A New Zealand Perspective
A few years ago there was an ad campaign for New Zealand making fun of the fact that we are often left off maps. When looking at cyber security news it often feels like we are missed off the map too. There were plenty of international round-ups of cyber security events for 2021, but few mentioned what happened here in Aotearoa New Zealand. To redress the balance, here’s our list of New Zealand’s publicly reported cyber security events from 2021:
The Grass Looks Greener from Here: Cyber Security Should Be Like Health and Safety
All the experts agree – cyber security should be an organisation-wide concern. And yet, in my experience too many organisations, and too many people in those organisations think that cyber security is solely the concern of (a) the security team, or (b) the IT/digital team. In case you need convincing my favourite response is that if there is a cyber-attack (or incident) then it is not the IT team’s job that is at risk, but part of the organisation (if the HR system is compromised it is the HR team who won’t be able to work, not the IT or security teams). Who knows what the impact is of an attack? It’s not IT, that’s for sure. And who is best placed to balance off the needs of the organisation with the cyber risks? It’s not security: if you left it up to me, I’d turn everything off! That’s the only way to be sure (and I get no benefit from it being on, so…)