Executive Summit

Join members of the Houston CISO Governing Body and their invited guests to launch the Executive Summit with a private networking reception.

The Greater Houston area’s top security leaders from top organizations, as well as supporting partners and speakers at the CISO Executive Summit the next day, will come together for an informal evening of food, drinks, conversation and fun.

You’ll also have the opportunity to take a break from screens and stress, and instead give back to the community with a service activity benefiting Texas Center for the Missing.

Despite the challenges posed by organizational and technological silos, the modern CISO is stepping up to the plate. Impactful digital transformation through intentional technology decisions can minimize organizational obstacles.

Join this fireside chat to discover:

• Embracing digital transformation to stay competitive and secure in today's business world
• Leveraging SASE to simplify your security architecture, level-up compliance monitoring and improve visibility
• Driving meaningful change with a holistic approach that considers not just security, but also organizational culture, processes, and people

The gender gap in cybersecurity — particularly in leadership roles — has been widely reported for years. How can CISOs come together as a community to be good allies in supporting and elevating their female peers in information security?

Join this session to hear from and discuss with your peers:

• Impacts of promoting a diverse and inclusive sector for women in security
• Barriers to entry and advancement for women in cyber
• Opportunities, and lessons learned, for today’s CISOs to move the industry forward

We live in a world where everything is hybrid and the blend between personal, corporate, private and public is ever-changing and presents us with a host of new challenges. This has increased and complicated the attack surface and the pressure to converge tools and do “more with less” is at peak levels. We must meet this watershed moment with the right team, plans, and technology.

Join this interactive session to learn:

• How to build an effective plan for change without adding to the chaos
• What consolidation approaches save money without sacrificing security
• Use cases that deliver immediate value and efficiency while improving user experience

In today’s threat landscape, security teams are frequently forced into reactive positions, lowering security program efficacy and sustainability. Strong foundational security program components, including vulnerability and asset management processes, are essential to building resilience in a persistently elevated threat climate.

Join this interactive boardroom to discuss:

• Defining what your emergency procedures and “playbooks” look like.
• How you prioritize CVEs, VPNs and firewalls
• Combatting the challenge of zero-day exploitation

This will be an intimate, informal space for women in cybersecurity leadership roles and their allies to freely discuss best practices, key challenges, and mission-critical priorities. Come prepared to share ideas and forge new connections that can help empower each other to make an impact in your organizations and the Greater Houston community.

This session is aimed at, but not limited to, women who are leading the cybersecurity function at their organizations (CISO or equivalent) or those reporting directly to the CISO/equivalent. Seating priority will be given to these women in cybersecurity leadership roles.

Learn how zero trust architecture secures users, workloads, and IoT/OT devices by addressing critical security shortcomings of legacy network architecture. This session covers key steps in a phased zero trust transformation journey as well as advice for winning the support of organizational leadership.

Join this session and learn to:

• Recognize issues inherent to routable networks
• Identify key phases of zero trust transformation
• Demystify zero trust architecture for business leaders

There's no denying the power and popularity of generative AI programs like ChatGPT. For good or for evil, its uses seem endless. Predicting exactly how this advanced AI will impact the future of cyber security is impossible. But through collaboration with your C-level peers, you might be able to prepare.

Join this interactive session to:

• Share your thoughts on enterprise use cases for generative AI
• Gauge the impact this tech advancement is having across industries
• Unpack concerns around developing policies, loss of IP, etc.

Have you ever found yourself asking, “Why do we need to prepare and submit multiple compliance reports when much of the information is common to the standards we’re trying to comply with?” ISO, PCI, SOC-2, FedRAMP, NIST – it's enough to make anyone's head spin.

Join this peer roundtable session to discuss:

• Mapping out overlap and identifying gaps between compliance frameworks
• Streamlining compliance efforts across entities or business units  
• Leveraging technology to gain better visibility, beyond point-in-time assessments

In today's digital ecosystem, it's an unfortunate reality that bad actors are able to move a lot faster than the "good guys." The static security programs and tech enterprises put in place 25 years ago should have been upgraded and updated at least 10 times since then, but let's face it — legacy technology, processes and attitudes present hurdles most organizations have trouble clearing.

Join this executive roundtable for a frank and open peer discussion about:

• Which systems/technologies/processes presenting the biggest challenges for security programs
• What really moves the needle when making the business case for modernization to leadership, the board, etc.
• What solutions (current and on the horizon) security leaders are looking to make their programs more dynamic

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.

With the role of the CISO becoming increasingly complex and multi-faceted, the traditional organizational structure of security reporting through the IT organization is no longer the best option for many organizations. One alternative reporting framework sparking a lot of attention right now is having the CISO reporting through the legal/risk team and directly to the General Counsel.

In this session, a CISO/GC team will be joining us to:

• Share how they've built such a successful working relationship — both before and after security moved under legal
• Discuss how and why the organization decided to transition of moving security within legal, and what the benefits have been 
• Facilitate an open conversation with the audience about "jailbreaking" security away from IT

The number of human and machine identities seeking access to data and critical business systems has grown exponentially, in turn increasing the threat landscape and challenging traditional IAM paradigms. How do security leaders keep a pulse on tools and capabilities to assess their organization’s cybersecurity posture?

Join this peer-driven roundtable conversation to discuss:

• Managing and securing identity across all environments — multi-cloud, hybrid, etc.
• Processes, policies and tools that add value to your IAM program
• Strategies for engaging other stakeholders/functions about access needs

How can CISOs collaborate better to bypass the skills shortage, become changemakers and create a talent pipeline that not only works for them, but also benefits their local community? It starts with having a conversation.

Join this interactive session to hear about some of the new cybersecurity education initiatives members of this CISO community are helping bring to Greater Houston, as well as share your input and ideas on how to build a more sustainable, local cyber talent pipeline.

Risk appetite fails when it is expressed in fuzzy, imprecise terms. Repositioning risk appetite in the context of investment and value delivery creates a measurable scale of risk that powers a new type of governance.

Join this session to learn:

• How concrete assertions of risk appetite can make executive decisions binding
• How can risk appetite drive risk decisions
• What scale can be used to measure risk appetite