Cybersecurity Leadership & Enterprise Risk

Chairpersons welcome and opening remarks.

High-profile attacks have put cybersecurity firmly on the board agenda. With regulators demanding accountability, how should boards and CISOs collaborate? This panel explores how enterprises can embed resilience at the core.

• Translating technical threats into business risk

• Building executive-level cyber fluency

• Practical steps for governance frameworks

• Evolving from traditional IAM to ISPM with continuous visibility, risk scoring, and posture assessment
• Mapping attack paths, privilege inheritance chains, and lateral movement
• Automating identity life cycle management with provisioning and RBAC at enterprise scale
• Securing access with phishing-resistant MFA and conditional access policies
• Detecting identity threats with ML-driven behavior analytics and real-time alerts
• Strengthening identity governance with access reviews and compliance reporting

Europe’s cyber regulatory environment is no longer evolving in predictable cycles, it is accelerating across multiple fronts simultaneously, from NIS2 and DORA to the Cyber Resilience Act, GDPR enforcement trends, and emerging AI governance. For cyber leaders, the challenge is no longer keeping up with individual frameworks, but anticipating how they collectively reshape risk, accountability, and operational expectations.

This panel focuses on what senior security and risk leaders need to understand now to stay ahead of regulatory change. For example, how requirements are converging, where enforcement pressure is intensifying, and what capabilities organisations must build to remain resilient in an increasingly regulated digital economy.

Trust, resilience, and sustainable growth have become defining measures of business success, and cybersecurity is now central to achieving all three. This keynote examines how leading organisations are repositioning cyber from a cost centre to a strategic business advantage, enabling innovation, strengthening customer confidence, and creating long-term enterprise value. Through the lens of executive leadership and boardroom priorities, the session reframes cybersecurity as a catalyst for competitive differentiation in the digital economy.

Reframing the compliance footprint from a burden into a competitive edge. This session examines the opportunity to bring efficiency, reduce workload and strengthen security across geographies – earning trust with customers and regulators. 

Cyber risk is commonly seen as an IT security issue—a matter of orchestrating tools and vendors. We have become trapped in security theater, building bureaucratic RACI matrices just to satisfy manic compliance, creating atomic sub-domains that mimic innovation, and simplifying workflows just to make them easier to automate. While teams deploy new shiny toys, standardize linear processes, and blame end-users, organizations blindly suffer from an illusion of control, completely giving away their actual security. This practical session cuts through the false positives and delivers a brutal reality check to show how organizations can reclaim control and protect what actually matters.

Legacy systems rarely make headlines until they become the reason an organisation can’t respond to a cyber incident. From critical business platforms to ageing infrastructure, these systems can create hidden vulnerabilities. Breaches too often trace back to “that old system everyone knew was a problem.”

This panel confronts the elephant in the server room: how do you modernise before it’s too late? Real-world stories will reveal the costs of delay versus the benefits of decisive action.

In today’s environment, organisations must go beyond the traditional checklist approach to security controls. Boards, regulators, and executive leadership increasingly demand measurable evidence of cyber risk posture, not just compliance with frameworks like NIST, ISO, or DORA. Quantifying risk and rigorously testing controls transforms abstract security efforts into effective enterprise risk management, reducing guesswork, prioritising spend, and enabling confident decision-making.

Cybersecurity’s talent shortage demands a rethink of how organisations hire. In this Women4Cyber panel discussion, cybersecurity leaders share how they have successfully brought women into cyber through career changes, and what they learned by looking beyond traditional CVs. From identifying transferable skills to challenging conventional hiring criteria and creating the right conditions for people to succeed, the panel will explore practical ways to widen the talent pool and build stronger, more resilient cybersecurity teams. Expect real-world insights, honest lessons and actionable ideas for employers looking to hire differently.