Tuesday, November 17, 2026

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Swan Room

Sponsored By: Mistral Alpha Echo

---

Presentation Outline

Trusted multi-source INTREP fusion 4:00pm - 4:30pm In modern military operations, accelerating the intelligence cycle without compromising operational rigor or security is a paramount challenge. Intelligence personnel are routinely overwhelmed by vast volumes of unstructured data across multiple domains, making rapid and accurate Intelligence Report (INTREP) fusion critical for effective decision-making. This 30-minute mini product brief demonstrates how Mistral empowers defence organisations to transform the information-processing and assessment stages of a targeting cycle using sovereign, self-hosted architectures. Presented by Nick, Australia Deployment Strategist at Mistral, the session showcases how combining modality-specific frontier models with a comprehensive AI tooling suite can automate and streamline multi-source data fusion. Attendees will discover how Mistral’s open-weight technology enables secure on-premises processing of sensitive intelligence, eliminating external data exposure and vendor lock-in. Crucially, the brief highlights how Mistral’s architecture is designed to support, rather than replace, military command. By maintaining complete visibility over source evidence, rigorous policy controls, continuous evaluation metrics, and audit trails, the system ensures that human judgment and final command authority remain explicitly transparent and firmly in human hands throughout every stage of the targeting workflow. Join us to see how sovereign AI can safely accelerate decision advantage on the ground. Crossing the Gap: Data Transfers, Security Controls and the Realities of Isolated Defence Environments 4:35pm - 4:50pm Isolation is what makes an air-gapped system defensible. It is also what can make it resource intensive to operate and administer. Patches, signatures, software builds all have to cross a boundary that exists precisely to stop things crossing it. This presentation examines the practical realities of moving data between security domains in highly classified environments, and how the ISM's controls for data transfer, gateways and media shape what can actually be built and authorised. We walk through the controls governing import and export processes: trusted sources, content filtering, protective marking verification, file type and keyword inspection, and the human decision points that automation does not remove. We look at the threats these controls exist to counter. Supply chain compromise in patches and vendor-supplied builds, malicious payloads embedded in routine file formats, data exfiltration disguised as legitimate export, and the insider pathways that removable media creates. We will also cover the challenges faced by security teams. Such as, audit and accountability for every item moved, malware risks on removable media, and the ongoing problem of keeping an isolated environment current without compromising the reasons it was isolated. The session is aimed at system owners, security practitioners and engineers working toward delivering an ICT environment to Defence or maintaining authorisation. It draws on Alpha Echo's experience delivering IRAP and embedded assessments across Defence and Defence industry, and on our development of a Data Inspection and Transfer appliance that automates transfers and reduces the manual handling these environments currently depend on.

---

Speaker