Toronto CISO Executive Summit

As cyber threats escalate, organizations must build resilience to effectively withstand and recover from attacks. Real-time threat intelligence provides CISOs with crucial insights to understand the company's risk landscape and respond swiftly. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is essential for fortifying resilience and enhancing communication with the C-suite and Board.

Join this session to discuss:

• Leveraging CTI to align cybersecurity strategies with organizational goals
• Using evidence-based threat intelligence to boost proactive defense and recovery
• Improving communication with executive leadership on risk management strategies

GenAI is changing rapidly, and the next major step is agentic AI — systems that are capable of taking actions without human oversight. This brings a new level of complexity, but there are benefits for security teams as well. Security leaders are now exploring the value and risk of agentic AI to determine how to advance safely. 

Join Elastic’s security leadership to explore:

• The use of GenAI in security and how it's advanced to meet different team needs
• How AI adoption changes your attack surface 
• The different ways AI augments security teams and workflows

Session details coming soon!

Session details coming soon!

Canadian CISOs aren’t just battling malware—they’re managing analyst burnout, navigating U.S.-Canada political friction, and rethinking trust in their tech stacks. Add in adversarial AI, alert fatigue, and the eternal skills shortage, and you've got a landscape where threat intel can feel more like background noise than actionable signal. Meanwhile, AI is becoming the double-edged sword of our time—accelerating detection on one hand, fueling smarter phishing and deepfake attacks on the other.

Join this closed-door discussion to hear and discuss concrete insights for improving your threat intel program, including:

• Making your threat intelligence program actually usable across strategic, tactical, and technical layers
• Where to focus your limited people, money, and time without inducing a mutiny
• What shifting global alliances and data politics mean for vendor selection, compliance, and resilience

As enterprises rapidly accelerate their digital initiatives, CISOs are tasked with striking a delicate balance between implementing the right structures and strategies to safeguard organizational assets and delivering services and applications faster than ever before. How are CISOs updating their operating models and team structures to keep pace with the changing nature of business priorities and the changing technology landscape?

Join this conversation to hear how your peers are:

• Evolving security operating models to deliver better speed, agility and security while optimizing cost savings  
• Assessing how their business units may evolve in line with new technological innovations
• Positioning their team as security advocates and demonstrating business value

CISOs know identity is the #1 attack vector, with over 80% of breaches stemming from an Identity attack. With identity playing such an integral role in keeping your organization secure, how can you strengthen your identity solution to work for you, not against you? 

Join this session to discuss:

• Gaining end-to-end visibility and real-time remediation
• Identifying, managing, and securing service accounts across the environment
• Enforcing security policies and automating lifecycle management

Session details coming soon!

We’re all familiar with the idea that “the best defense is a good offense.” But for cybersecurity – where the mandate has always been “defend and protect” – how do CISOs truly go on the offensive? For Kees Pouw, CISO at Questrade, the answer lies in a high-fidelity cyber testing strategy. 

In this session, Kees shares how he built out an offensive security team that helped propel Questrade’s cybersecurity program, covering:

• Challenges preventing CISOs from doing enough testing to build confidence in controls
• Strategies and resources for building an offensive security strategy, whether inhouse or outsourced
• Considerations on the use of GenAI by inhouse cybersecurity office team

There is no one-size-fits-all method for articulating cybersecurity business value to the board and other stakeholders, often making it a challenge for CISOs to compete for continued investment and buy-in. How can cybersecurity leaders translate the strategic benefits of their programs into business value when quantitative data is limited, unavailable or difficult to defend?

In this session, Gartner Executive Partner Pierre Gourdon leverages the latest insights from the Gartner Research team to facilitate an interactive discussion on:

• Expressing the value of a cybersecurity in terms that relate to the board
• Evaluating the capabilities of your security and risk management program
• Developing a roadmap to balance risk management with facilitating business outcomes

Every leader has a reputation, but not every leader has a brand. And while both impact your success, an intentionally crafted executive brand not only speaks for you when you're not in the room but puts you in a position to attract, recognize and realize opportunities that further your goals.  

Sean Barnes — a CIO and CHRO turned executive coach — shares insights learned from his own journey of discovering and developing a powerful personal brand, highlighting the opportunities and challenges leaders face in doing so. You'll leave this talk inspired and empowered to take control of how the world sees you, with actionable tips for:

• Becoming known for the things that matter to you
• Crafting an executive brand that is authentically yours
• Owning your brand inside and outside your organization

Sensitive data movement can be risky but restricting it outright can create operational and security challenges. In an era of agentic AI, generative AI, and emerging quantum computing, organizations need security frameworks that protect data while ensuring agility. This session explores how modern security platforms enable secure data flow, adapt to diverse use cases and prepare for the post-quantum encryption (PQE) shift.

Join this keynote to learn:

• How to choose the right secure access method for each use case
• Why security must be adaptive to risk, user behavior and AI-driven interactions
• How to prepare for post-quantum encryption and its enterprise security impact

While most cybersecurity programs are trapped in an endless cycle of patches and fixes, true transformation happens when CISOs shift both their mindsets and methods to break free of traditional thinking and welcome innovation.

Join veteran CISO Mike Melo and transformation expert Rob Oddi for a candid dialogue about reimagining the entire mindset of security leadership, addressing key concerns like:

• Reframing the role of security from reactive defense to strategic influence
• Demonstrating business value that resonates from the boardroom to the server room
• Embracing transformative change and driving true organizational impact