CXO Think Tank

If digital transformation is a journey, then data is the fuel that transports your company from here to there. Comprehending and creating insight from data is transformational. Being able to gather and analyze data to generate a competitive edge, creates new opportunities and promotes innovation. However, to support a pipeline of up-to-date and competitive modern data and analytics, a sound foundation and architecture must be constructed.

According to Gartner 79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach during the pandemic. Remote work is here to stay, and the concept of securing a perimeter has essentially ended. Traditional application security measures are broken. The need to innovate faster and shift to cloud-native application architectures isn’t just driving complexity, it’s creating significant vulnerability blind spots also.

Under the thumb of the pandemic, enterprises and IT leaders had to look for tech solutions that were resilient and agile to empower the remote workforce. To sustain business continuity plans, organizations shifted workloads to the cloud. As much as cloud adoption offers flexibility and productivity, it also exposes organizations to cyber threats and data breaches. So the question remains if moving to the cloud is the right thing to do and if so how to protect it from the new risks given that most organizations believe that application security should be completely automated to keep pace with dynamic clouds and rapid software development practices.

Bridging the gap between business and technology is not easy and requires discipline and balance between technology, people, and the business. For so many organizations today, technology is the business. Technology needs to be understood as a critical enabler in every part of the organization from the front line to the back office. It creates new value by crunching data to deliver new insights, it spurs innovation, and it disrupts traditional business models.

For business and technology leaders alike, new actions and behavioral changes can help their organizations make this shift. CIOs must take responsibility for problems, they should convey that when technology fails, many people typically share responsibility.

A zero trust approach to security has been steadily gaining steam for the last several years. The importance of this approach reached a new level with the May 2021 White House executive order requiring federal agencies to shift to this architecture by fall 2024.

Ransomware continues to grow and clearly as remote work became the new norm, and e-commerce increased. Leaders need to establish a mature level of cyber resilience to better handle ransomware and other potential data breaches. Luckily, zero trust can play a critical part in that strategy as more and more businesses are realizing that to build customer trust they must establish zero tolerance for trust in their security strategy. Will Zero Tolerance for Trust redefine the state of security as government and private industry scrutinize their trusted relationships more, and re-evaluate the ‘who, what, why’ in 2023 more than any other year?

The terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "Advanced Machine Learning" are often thought of interchangeably. While there is a relationship between AI and AML, to say they are the same thing is an oversimplification and misclassification. Rather, one begets the other with AI being the basic principle upon which AML is developed.

As AI begins to mature and migrate away from purely advanced mathematical operations into decision making paradigms, AML steps forward as the predictive ability of machines to process vast quantities of data. As data and analytics becomes foundational to the way every business operates, AI and AML will become foundational capabilities.

How do CISOs get the most out of APIs while limiting the risk?  20 years ago the motives for hackers were website defacement and getting your name on all those defacements. That was the point of hacking. Now, it’s all about monetizing the data you can steal.

Just as cloud computing initially seeped into organizations under the cloak of shadow IT, application programming interface (API) adoption has often followed an organic, inexact, and unaudited path. IT leaders know they are benefiting from APIs, internal, via third parties, and often outwardly exposed. They just don’t know where they are, how much they support key services, and how they’re being used, or abused!

In this session we will discuss if APIs are meant to be exposed, and discuss if the startups API software companies are ready for the explosion.

Data is a key enabler for all of the CIO’s plans to transform and should be at the heart of any organizational strategy. All of the digitization in our world today means we have enormous amounts of data available, and data has now become the number one business asset for every organization. The utilization of data has grown exponentially giving organizations the ability to better understand customers, research key trends, and much more. Enterprises are heading towards an environment of uncertainty and ambiguity that requires continuous flexibility, innovation and investment or reinvestment in data and analytics strategies.