Chris Haigh

Chris Haigh is a pragmatic cyber security 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 grounded in case law and regulatory precedent that make risk visible, budgets justifiable, and outcomes measurable.