Chicago CISO Community
Executive Summit

In today's complex and rapidly evolving corporate landscape, building trust isn't merely a "nice-to-have"; it's a critical foundation for cultivating equity. But how can senior leaders restore trust within themselves and among their teams to ensure equitable growth and collaborative success?
 
Join Minda Harts, Workplace and Equity Consultant & Author, to learn about:

• Fostering trust to lay the foundation for a more equitable, inclusive, and harmonious workplace
• Embarking on a journey of self-reflection and self-improvement to inspire trust among a team
• Embracing trust as a dynamic bond that requires ongoing effort and adaptability

From capital expenditures to supply chain disruptions, maintaining legacy on-premise data centers requires significant resources. For Brian Palmer, moving Ventas’ applications to the cloud has been an inclusive solution that has positioned the business to quickly take advantage of new technologies and opportunities.

Join this session to learn how to:

• Lay the foundation through pre-migration training, planning and evaluation
• Leverage resources to fill knowledge and skills gaps
• Identify the pros, cons and pitfalls of cloud migration

Ransomware attacks continue to evolve and AI is now leveraged by threat actors as both a weapon and an attack vector. Successfully handling a ransomware attack today requires skillful orchestration between multiple elements, including strategic negotiations. Delve into attackers mindset and tactics to gain valuable insights on how infamous threat actors think and operate.

Join this session to discuss:

• Real-world case studies of destructive AI-driven ransomware attacks
• The importance of integrating strategic negotiation into your overall response effort
• Key insights from organizations that defeated ransomware attacks through effective response and preparedness

Managing cyber risk across an enterprise IT infrastructure has never been harder. Remote workers, advancing attack methods, and an ever-expanding vendor network are challenging every firm, as total visibility into threats has become nearly impossible. As digital business strategy matures, more organizations are becoming dependent on the cyber posture and protection of third parties. Third-party risks present a unique challenge because you are depending on vendors and partners to operate securely to keep your data and information safe. How are you mitigating the associated risks and demonstrating this to the business to ensure effective security programs?

Join our session to hear about:

• Common failings across TPRM programs that led to breach events
• How executives can provide strategic direction for third-party risk teams
• Key practices being implemented by leading vendor risk firms to maintain strong supply chain risk management

For leaders, there’s nothing new about managing internal expectations on hyped technologies, but the recent advancements in AI have caused an increased and urgent demand for the evaluation and adoption of generative AI models. There is no question that these breakthroughs are just the beginning, but technology executives must temper expectations and ensure a thoughtful approach to building AI models that will add more value than risk.

Join this session to discuss:

• Opportunities and limitations in applying AI to security solutions
• Identifying and aligning a business need and use case for AI implementation
• Using native AI to secure the business amidst a quickly shifting landscape

Connect with like-minded peers in a one-on-one setting through Evanta’s Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

Being a well-rounded CISO can’t be hacked. It takes consistent reflection and re-invention as the role evolves from a technology-focused position to a business-enabling one.

Join this interactive session to discuss:

• Identifying common threads of a successful CISO across all organizations
• Playing on your strengths and leaning into areas of opportunity
• Finding your place as a proven leader and business enabler

For over a decade, security leaders and architects utilized a disparate best of breed point solution framework to solve their security challenges. This resulted in bloated security architectures, overlap in capabilities and significant security architecture and integration failures. These failures impacted organization’s ability to scale to meet business demands and reduced stability of the security architecture as environments and data volumes grew. The use of AI driven detections, automation, endpoint security, attack surface management and realtime threat intelligence application were the moonshot achievements for security solutions like SIEM, but were never achieved.

Join this session to discuss:

• Scaling to meet business demands and stabilizing your security architecture
• Reimagining organizational  security operations programs based on standardization 
• Achieving the impossible with security information and event management

Given today’s dynamic threat landscape, involving constantly changing malicious TTPs, CISOs must have a proactive threat management strategy to handle complex attacks. However, with widely distributed infrastructures and the number of tools with different levels of control and responsibility, maintaining true visibility is difficult. Staffing shortages and the high volume of alerts that come in from fragmented tools adds to this challenge. The solution? Unifying the analyst experience to connect existing tools and workflows across your hybrid cloud environment.

Join this session to discuss:

• Detecting and responding to advanced attacks like ransomware
• Unifying the analyst experience with AI and machine learning - starting with understanding your attack surface and through EDR/XDR, SIEM, SOAR
• Identifying blind spots in your cloud security strategy due to information fragmentation

Organizations worldwide are being faced with multistage attacks such as BEC, ransomware, and supply chain, that happen with the same basic steps in the same sequence. It’s been a decade since defenders began referring to this as the attack chain, but the attacks continue to successful with the same tactics, from phishing to Active Directory abuse to data exfiltration. So how do we finally turn the tables on adversaries, and take away what they depend on across the attack chain?

Join this interactive round table as CISOs discuss:

• Understanding the evolving nature of initial compromises
• The art and science of preventing small compromises from becoming big incidents
• Reducing your team's workload by using the attack chain to prioritize controls

Join this dedicated networking session for women in cybersecurity leadership roles and their allies to freely discuss best practices, key challenges and mission-critical priorities surrounding mentorship and building a strong network. Come prepared to share ideas and forge new connections that can help empower each other to make an impact in your organizations and the Chicagoland area.

This session is aimed at, but not limited to, women who are leading the cybersecurity function at their organizations (CISO or equivalent) and those reporting directly to the CISO/equivalent. Priority access will be reserved to these groups.