Building Resilience and Aligning Strategies: Navigating Cybersecurity and Business Challenges in the Modern Era
In a time of global uncertainty, rising cyber threats, and rapid advances in AI, today’s cybersecurity leaders are navigating more complexity than ever. This summit brings together forward-thinking professionals to explore how to lead with clarity, build resilience against evolving threats like ransomware, and unlock the full potential of data in a cloud-first, AI-powered world. Join us to shape the future of cybersecurity leadership—where trust, agility, and innovation drive real impact.
Immerse yourself in thought-provoking insights
Exclusively curated from our previous
Security Physical Summit
Core Themes
Leading Through Chaos: Cyber Leadership in a Chaotic World
Today’s cyber leaders aren’t just tech experts—they’re diplomats, strategists, and crisis navigators. With global tensions rising and regulations shifting like sand, the role is less about managing systems and more about managing uncertainty. This theme explores how to lead with clarity and confidence when the rules keep changing, trust is fragile, and the stakes are sky-high.
The 3 R’s of Cyber Survival: Readiness, Ransomware & Resilience
Ransomware attacks are not uncommon, they are persistent. In a world where cyber threats strike swiftly and fiercely, organisations require more than a mere response plan. This theme examines how to foster genuine, enduring resilience by integrating security into every layer of your business, from culture to crisis response, ensuring you are prepared before, during, and after the breach.
Data Power-Up: Making Data Work for You in the Age of AI
AI is getting smarter, and your data is more valuable (and vulnerable) than ever. As agentic AI and cloud-first strategies take hold, cyber leaders need to treat data like the crown jewel it is. This theme unpacks how to protect, govern, and unlock the full potential of your data, without getting buried in buzzwords.
Speakers
Sulohita Vaddadi
Dewayne Hart
Lovelie Moore
Wendy Battles
Amit Basu
Michael Evans
Bingdong Li
Patrick Dillon
Kevin O'Connor
Alex Hesterberg
Jordanne Barrett
Raj Singh
Jimmy Benoit
GS Jha
Jack Berkowitz
Billy Hoffman
Chris Rodgers
Agenda
1:10 pm - 1:35 pm
Keynote
Navigating the Storm: The Agile and Adaptable Cyber Leader
In today’s rapidly changing landscape, cyber leaders face unprecedented challenges. With a myriad of new regulations, geopolitical uncertainty, and a fragile supply chain, the ability to adapt and remain agile has transformed from a mere advantage into a vital necessity. This keynote will highlight the vital role of agility in cybersecurity leadership, emphasizing the need to anticipate emerging threats and balance advanced tools with foundational strategies. Attendees will gain insights into how modern CISOs can align cybersecurity initiatives with business goals while ensuring strong protection against evolving risks.
Join this keynote talk to discuss:
- Embrace Agility and Flexibility: Adapt to constant threats and challenges while keeping your team and business safe
- Balance Advanced Tools with Core Strategies: Integrate advanced cybersecurity tools while maintaining strong foundational practices
- Strategic Leadership and Communication: Align and communicate cybersecurity priorities with business goals effectively
1:40 pm - 2:20 pm
Panel
Cyber Strategy on the Edge: Leading When the World Won’t Sit Still
Today’s cyber leaders are navigating more than just networks, they’re steering through global tensions, shifting regulations, and rising expectations from the boardroom. This panel is about leading with clarity when the world feels anything but clear. Forget the usual crisis playbook. We’re zooming out to look at the big picture: how to stay ahead of disruption, influence top-level decisions, and align your cyber strategy with what’s happening across the globe.
Join this panel to discuss:
- Reading the Room (Globally): How to track and interpret geopolitical shifts that could impact your business and cyber posture
- Regulatory Curveballs: Staying agile when the rules keep changing—without losing your footing
- Boardroom Translation Skills: Turning complex cyber risk into clear, strategic conversations that drive action
2:20 pm - 2:45 pm
Diamond Keynote
Cybersecurity DJ: Spinning a Setlist of Trusted Apps and Zero Malware
If your environment were a party, who would you trust to control the music? Great playlists don’t happen by accident—they’re intentional. In this session, we’ll show how Airlock Digital helps you create a curated playlist of trusted applications, ensuring only approved software makes the set while everything untrusted is permanently skipped. It’s the deny-by-default approach, delivered with the precision of a DJ who knows exactly what the crowd needs. With a blend of humor, real-world examples, and practical takeaways, you’ll learn how to block the noise, stop threats before they start, and keep your organization dancing to a secure, uninterrupted beat.
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Roundtables
Track 1: Crafting a Modern Data Strategy in the Age of Agentic AI
The rise of Agentic AI is revolutionizing data creation and consumption, presenting new challenges and opportunities for security teams. As AI agents proliferate, they bring complexities in data governance, identity management, and risk mitigation. How can organizations develop a robust data strategy that leverages AI while safeguarding critical assets?
Join this session to explore:
- Navigating AI-Driven Data Creation: Effective practices for ongoing monitoring to identify risks associated with shadow AI and dark data
- Rapid Response Techniques: Strategies for quick investigation and response to insider threats and AI-related vulnerabilities
- Evolving Data Protection: Adopting a risk-based approach to protect mission-critical data and support innovation in the AI era
Track 2: Activating the Ransomware and Exfiltration Kill Switch: Leveraging AI to protect your most precious asset - Production Data
In 2025, data loss remains a critical issue due to cyberattacks, system failures, and human error. This session explores how artificial intelligence can analyze and identify patterns indicative of potential data breaches within a unified framework, dramatically improving efforts to protect valuable organizational data. Additionally, it emphasizes treating data with the same rigor as software, ensuring accountability across business processes, and the importance of tagging and classification for AI and compliance.
Key Takeaways:
- Enhanced Data Protection: Practical steps for better protecting data integrity using AI-supported frameworks
- Data as a Product: Managing data sets with the same rigor as software to ensure quality, usability, and user satisfaction.
- Accountability and Compliance: Ensuring clear roles and responsibilities for data security and leveraging tagging and classification for effective AI monitoring and regulatory compliance
Track 3: Building a Culture of Security
Organizations with strong security cultures gain advantages in innovation, agility, and trust. Gartner advocates transitioning from compliance-driven awareness to comprehensive programs that deeply embed secure behaviors. While technology matters, employee engagement is equally vital. This session explores the role of leadership, employee empowerment, and strategies for building a resilient culture. It advocates moving from a compliance mindset to shared responsibility, reframing cybersecurity as a core part of organizational culture, not just a technical issue.
Key Discussion Points:
- Culture of security vs. security culture
- Three main pillars to a security culture: Distributed Ownership, Executive Ownership, Blame-Free Culture
- Risk ownership is distributed across the business with the need for support from the top
3:00 pm - 6:30 pm
1:1 Meetings
4:10 pm - 4:40 pm
Presentation
Evolution of the CISO Role : From Data Room to Boardroom—And Now the Courtroom?
The CISO role has rapidly evolved from technical guardian to strategic advisor in the boardroom. But with rising regulatory scrutiny and breach-related litigation, CISOs now face potential personal liability. This piece examines the expanding scope—and risk—of the modern CISO, highlighting the urgent need for clearer accountability, legal safeguards, and board-level support.
4:45 pm - 5:15 pm
Workshop
8:30 pm - 8:55 pm
Dinner Keynote
Changing the Narrative: Keeping Business at The Forefront of Cybersecurity
Security leadership must wear multiple hats and make decisions that can sometimes be costly and impactful. As threat actors become more aggressive and attack surfaces expand, leaders must facilitate risk management and drive business objectives as a single initiative. This keynote session will resolve the risk by highlighting how to interconnect cybersecurity and business into the broader picture. The audience will gain knowledge on how to remove security silos and keep business operational.
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Key Takeaways:
- Gain ideas to transition security leadership from a technical necessity to a boardroom asset
- Understand why leaders must strategize emerging technologies into security and business objectives
- Discuss how successful leaders embrace adaptability, cyber visibility, and operational resilience to achieve business success
8:00 am - 8:40 am
Panel
The 3 R’s of Cyber Survival: Readiness, Ransomware & Resilience
In today’s high-speed threat landscape, waiting for a crisis to hit before taking action just doesn’t cut it. This session is about rethinking response—ditching outdated, siloed models in favor of fast, flexible, and cross-functional strategies that work when the pressures on. We’ll explore how to lead with clarity in the heat of the moment, empower your workforce to act as your first line of defense, and build a culture of trust and readiness across the organization. Because when the alarm sounds, every second counts—and everyone needs to know exactly what to do, and why it matters.
Key Takeaways
- Holistic Leadership: How to break down silos and lead a unified, business-wide response
- Cyber-Ready Culture: Practical ways to train, empower, and activate your people
- Trust as a Force Multiplier: Align stakeholders and overcome resistance
8:40 am - 9:10 am
Platinum Keynote
AI Revolution
9:20 am - 12:10 am
1:1 Meetings
9:20 am - 10:20 pm
Roundtables
Track 1: Crafting a Modern Data Strategy in the Age of Agentic AI
The rise of Agentic AI is revolutionizing data creation and consumption, presenting new challenges and opportunities for security teams. As AI agents proliferate, they bring complexities in data governance, identity management, and risk mitigation. How can organizations develop a robust data strategy that leverages AI while safeguarding critical assets?
Join this session to explore:
- Navigating AI-Driven Data Creation: Effective practices for ongoing monitoring to identify risks associated with shadow AI and dark data
- Rapid Response Techniques: Strategies for quick investigation and response to insider threats and AI-related vulnerabilities
- Evolving Data Protection: Adopting a risk-based approach to protect mission-critical data and support innovation in the AI era
Track 2: Activating the Ransomware and Exfiltration Kill Switch: Leveraging AI to protect your most precious asset - Production Data
In 2025, data loss remains a critical issue due to cyberattacks, system failures, and human error. This session explores how artificial intelligence can analyze and identify patterns indicative of potential data breaches within a unified framework, dramatically improving efforts to protect valuable organizational data. Additionally, it emphasizes treating data with the same rigor as software, ensuring accountability across business processes, and the importance of tagging and classification for AI and compliance.
Key Takeaways:
- Enhanced Data Protection: Practical steps for better protecting data integrity using AI-supported frameworks
- Data as a Product: Managing data sets with the same rigor as software to ensure quality, usability, and user satisfaction.
- Accountability and Compliance: Ensuring clear roles and responsibilities for data security and leveraging tagging and classification for effective AI monitoring and regulatory compliance
Track 3: Building a Culture of Security
Organizations with strong security cultures gain advantages in innovation, agility, and trust. Gartner advocates transitioning from compliance-driven awareness to comprehensive programs that deeply embed secure behaviors. While technology matters, employee engagement is equally vital. This session explores the role of leadership, employee empowerment, and strategies for building a resilient culture. It advocates moving from a compliance mindset to shared responsibility, reframing cybersecurity as a core part of organizational culture, not just a technical issue.
Key Discussion Points:
- Culture of security vs. security culture
- Three main pillars to a security culture: Distributed Ownership, Executive Ownership, Blame-Free Culture
- Risk ownership is distributed across the business with the need for support from the top
10:30 am - 11:00 am
Future Focus Speakers
Beyond Phishing: Rethinking Cybersecurity Awareness Through Human-Centered Change
Despite years of phishing simulations and compliance training, human risk remains one of cybersecurity’s most persistent challenges. In this session, Wendy Battles will explore how integrating organizational change management and strategic relationship-building can transform awareness programs into dynamic, people-first initiatives. Could it be that the real breakthrough in cybersecurity awareness won’t come from better metrics, but from mastering the art of human influence and connection?
Key Takeaways
- Why phishing simulations alone won’t shift long-term behavior
- How to leverage leadership and cross-functional allies to build awareness momentum
- Practical ways to embed human skills into cybersecurity programs
11:05 am - 11:35 am
Sponsor Workshop
A Hacker’s View From the Dark Side of the Internet
Why do breaches keep happening when companies are drowning in security tools? Because attackers look where defenders don’t. Forgotten staging servers, stray DNS records, and legacy systems from acquisitions past become invisible entry points: missed by scanners, but obvious to adversaries.
In this session, Billy Hoffman will demonstrate, live and on stage, how attackers recon and exploit a Fortune 250 attack surface using nothing more than free tools, against a certain well-known Atlanta beverage company you may have heard of.
Key Takeaways
- Why traditional security tools overlook critical parts of the attack surface
- How attackers really discover and exploit hidden entry points
- A live, eye-opening demonstration of attack surface discovery against a global brand
12:35 pm - 1:00 pm
Closing Keynote
Agentic AI & the Data Dilemma: Lead Smarter, Not Blindly
As agentic AI becomes more embedded in enterprise systems, leaders face a critical challenge: how to unlock its potential without exposing their organizations to risk. This keynote unpacks the essential groundwork, data governance, classification, and control that must be in place before scaling AI. Are you leading AI adoption with clarity and control, or reacting to hype and hope?
Join this closing keynote session to explore:
- Lead with Data Clarity: Know what you have, where it lives, and how it’s protected
- Govern Before You Scale: Build rules, not regrets
- Empower, Don’t Replace: Use AI to amplify human capability, not sideline it
1:00 pm - 2:10 pm
1:1 Meetings
2:15 pm - 2:30 pm
Beyond the Challenges
The Starling - Atlanta, GA
A unique stay minutes from downtown. In the heart of Midtown Atlanta, we are next to Colony Square with several restaurants, shops, and featured events.
Why attend?
Connect with like-minded senior leaders for a curated agenda, focused on tackling your current business critical challenges and driving industry forward.
Be a part of exclusive shared learning, horizon scanning and actionable insights enabling organizations to deliver transformative strategies.
Build meaningful relationships with solution providers matched to your business priorities to help accelerate your projects and deliver your objectives.
