Chris Haigh is a pragmatic cybersecurity leader with more than 25 years’ experience helping Australian organisations tackle real-world risk. As Chief Information Security Officer at Mercury IT, he’s known for cutting through noise and translating technical threats into clear, board-level decisions that actually get funded.

With a career spanning red, blue, and purple teams, Chris brings a rare, end-to-end view of how breaches happen, how they’re stopped, and why “reasonable steps” must be defensible, not rhetorical. He argues that compliance done properly isn’t a box to tick, it’s leverage, the kind that protects customers, strengthens architecture, and holds up under regulatory scrutiny.

Above all, Chris is focused on evidence over alarmism. He moves audiences past fear-driven security and into practical strategies that make risk visible, budgets justifiable, and outcomes measurable.