Cloud, AI & The Future of Cyber Defence

Chairpersons welcome and opening remarks

Cloud-native adoption and hybrid environments introduce new security challenges. This panel explores managing risk across multi-cloud, SaaS, and DevOps environments.

• Cloud-native vs traditional security models

• Closing the skills gap

• Case studies from retail, finance, and energy

AI is only as powerful as the data it can access, but what happens when that data is sensitive? As organisations race to adopt AI, the real challenge isn’t just building smarter models, it’s ensuring they use information responsibly. This keynote explores how organisations can accelerate AI innovation, tackle data security risks and protecting what matters the most. Can we trust AI with our most sensitive data?

We are entering a world where AI no longer just advises, it acts. The question facing every organization is how to capture the speed and value of this new autonomy without loosening control over identities, data, models and cryptography. This session explores why dynamic trust, sovereign control and crypto-agility are becoming the next priorities on the cyber leader’s agenda and share practical guidance for building Trusted Autonomy while preserving security, accountability and control.

AI adoption often starts with approved tools and employee policies. Policy alone cannot give security teams the visibility and control they need. In this session, I will show how Cloudflare built a secure AI workspace for its own employees. I will cover the architecture behind isolated workspaces, curated company context, controlled access to internal systems, model routing and audit. The session explains how built-in security controls can support broader AI adoption without losing control.

AI is moving from experiment to enterprise infrastructure at remarkable speed. But while businesses race to harness its potential, cybercriminals are doing the same. This panel brings together security leaders to examine the threats emerging in real time, from AI-powered attacks and autonomous agents to model manipulation, data leakage and vulnerabilities that didn’t exist a year ago. The conversation will cut through the hype to explore what businesses should be worried about now, what’s coming next, and how organisations can build security strategies that keep pace with an AI threat landscape evolving faster than ever.

Application security is experiencing its biggest transformation in decades. As regulations such as the Cyber Resilience Act make security non-optional and AI fundamentally changes how software is built, organizations can no longer rely on traditional approaches to funding, implementing, and scaling AppSec. Drawing on insights from conversations with customers across industries, this session explores why the old security playbook is no longer enough. We will examine how AI is reshaping the daily reality of software engineers, what modern application security looks like in AI-driven development environments, and why organizations that fail to adapt risk being left behind. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll discuss why this moment represents not only a challenge but also an opportunity. In a rapidly changing landscape where nobody has all the answers, innovation, experimentation, and the willingness to embrace change may be the biggest competitive advantages of all.

This keynote examines how to transform data into a strategic asset, focusing on aligning analytics with overarching goals and maximizing value from data-driven insights.

• Strategic frameworks for data alignment
• Methods for integrating data with business objectives
• Maximizing insights through advanced analytics

Attackers are already using AI to craft smarter phishing lures, morph malware past defences, and chain small misconfigurations into full breaches and in a fraction of the time it used to take. This session turns that same offensive AI power inward to find real, exploitable weaknesses.

We’ll walk through the process and share hands-on examples of turning offensive AI into a recurring stress test, one that helps you catch vulnerabilities in your systems and web applications ahead of the attackers.

Every day, files leave the organisation – by email, cloud link, or shadow IT – and control slips away the moment a copy is sent. This talk reframes external file sharing not as an IT feature but as a design problem: shadow IT is rarely a behaviour problem, it’s a sign that the secure route isn’t the easy route. Drawing on GDPR, DORA and NIS2 – which all boil down to one question: can you demonstrate control? – this session shows how to move from “sharing a file” to “granting controlled access,” and lays out a 90-day plan (understand, pilot, activate, embed) to get there. The core message: usability is security, and compliance only sticks once the safe path is also the simplest one.

As AI becomes part of how organizations operate, it’s also reshaping how they detect threats, defend their systems, and govern risk. This panel brings together perspectives from security technology, enterprise leadership, and AI governance to explore what’s changing across each of these areas  and what organizations need to think about as they move forward.