Identity, Zero Trust & Security Architecture

Chairpersons welcome and opening remarks

Modern breaches rarely start with infrastructure—they start with identity. Attackers exploit misconfigured privileges, stale credentials and poorly governed access paths to move laterally across organisations. This session explores how identity has become the most exploited layer in enterprise security and what security teams must do to defend it.

Zero Trust teaches us to assume that there’s a breach—but what’s the worst that could happen when there IS a breach? And how do you mitigate against that?

Join Pete Hannah, Vice President of Sales, Northern Europe at Object First, as he discusses why data resilience is critical in the evolving cybersecurity landscape—and what that means in practice. Leveraging insights from research on data protection and ransomware trends, Pete will explore how organizations can prepare for the worst-case scenario: where a cybercriminal has access to all passwords and secrets.

Meeting regulatory and cyber insurance requirements and, ultimately, guaranteeing business survival mean this is no longer ‘just’ an IT topic, it’s a board-level imperative.

As organisations move toward hybrid infrastructure, cloud platforms, distributed applications, connected devices and increasingly automated workloads, identity has become a fundamental control plane for cybersecurity.

Traditional IAM and privileged-access approaches remain important, but they are no longer sufficient on their own. Security teams must increasingly understand not only who has access, but also what is requesting access, under which conditions, with what level of privilege, and how trust should continuously change as risk changes.

This session explores an identity-centric approach to Zero Trust architecture for highly distributed environments. It examines how organisations can evolve from traditional access management toward continuous verification and risk-aware access across human users, privileged identities, workloads, APIs, devices and emerging AI-enabled systems.

Machine identities, service accounts, APIs, containers and automation systems are rapidly outnumbering human identities in modern enterprises. This discussion explores how organisations are managing, monitoring and securing machine identities before they become the next major attack vector.

Trust is a key challenge for secure data sharing across organisations and ecosystems. This session explores trust architectures for data spaces, covering cross-organisational data sharing architectures, trust frameworks, policies, rules, and practical use cases. It will address the challenges of sharing data between different ecosystems and provide insights into current approaches and future developments, including topics such as trustworthy AI.

Chairperson’s Closing Remarks