Seattle CIO Executive Summit

With the acquisition of Virgin America, Alaska Airlines is now the fifth largest airline in the U.S. serving 115 destinations with nearly 1,200 daily flights in the United States, Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica and has the privilege of flying the most nonstop flights from the West Coast – that’s #MostWestCoast. As CIO of Alaska Airlines, Charu Jain and her team led the seamless integration of the two airlines’ IT systems. Drawing on knowledge from her career in the airline industry, Jain shares M&A best practices around:

• How having a key set of principles while merging 450 Alaska systems and 250 Virgin America systems helped preserve the customer experience.
• How to successfully execute such a big cross-functional initiative that touches everything in the company, while continually improving and innovating based on lessons learned and delivering value.
• How bringing together the technologies across business units was key, but it was a people- and culture-first strategy that helped IT power the merger and create a new, better blended enterprise

Eric Cowperthwaite was brought in to update Esterline Technologies’ IT and security programs so the enterprise could keep pace with immense digital workplace transformation. “It’s one thing to say I want IT to look different in 18 months,” Cowperthwaite says. “It’s much different to do it.” In this session, Cowperthwaite:

• Talks about the laser focus put on identifying change mandates, gaining program sponsors and champions, and translating it all into executable actions
• Explains how he, a cross-functional team and the business overcame cultural and technology challenges to move the needle from idea to launch.

The struggle to find and keep IT talent in the Pacific Northwest is real. From record unemployment to unending compensation pressure, the local market landscape has never been more nuanced and complicated. Three CHROs with unique perspectives on navigating these complexities share what they are doing to tackle current trends for their organizations.

Come ready to hear ideas, including:

• Promoting an organization’s purpose
• Getting creative with long-term incentives, pay and benefits
• Offering flexible work schedules and attractive relocation opportunities, where applicable
• Identify future needs and grow talent within where possible

Security vendors, InfoSec specialists and cybersecurity professionals claim to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to defend customers against the most advanced threats in cybersecurity. But if you ask how these technologies work, answers can be vague or completely lacking.

Come to this interactive session ready to:

• Look at the mechanics of artificial intelligence and machine learning, exploring how different techniques are used to detect malware, malicious domains, phishing emails and other threats
• Learn how these technologies can potentially fail, and how attackers bypass them to infiltrate poorly designed or implemented systems
• Share best practices from the AI and ML space

If you’d like to join this closed-door interactive discussion, please contact Sean Chalmers at sean.chalmers@evanta.com or 503-972-2166.

Every login attempt should be analyzed with multiple factors in mind to determine its legitimacy. But how do you thwart attacks in-process and prevent your organization from becoming the next breach headline? This interactive discussion explores solutions, such as adaptive and two-factor authentication, to reduce risk and keep inside and outside threats at bay. Come armed with security-related ideas and questions around device profiles, IP addresses, identity profiles, unauthorized locations, and anomalous keystrokes, mouse movements and user behavior, as well as actions that can be taken to raise red flags and catch wrongdoers.

If you’d like to join this closed-door interactive discussion, please contact Sean Chalmers at sean.chalmers@evanta.com or 503-972-2166.

This esteemed panel of CISOs provide their perspectives on the Internet of Things and answer these questions:

• How do you define IoT, and how does it differ from IIoT?
• Are IoT and IIoT devices managed devices?
• Should we care about the identity and ownership of all IoT devices, and are asset inventories of all devices necessary? If so, how do you inventory?
• As security professionals, we worry about confidentiality, availability and integrity, but as we extend into industrial environments should we not all add “safety” to that list?

Before transitioning to a new Enterprise Resource Planning platform, Multnomah County, Oregon changed and transformed their approach to the RFP process. They began by choosing a set of products and a system integrator that left open solution options for the long haul. The result — saving millions of dollars and 18 months of time. Bob Leek shares how a bimodal and experimental approach, and a “being bold requires being bold” attitude transformed an organization’s procurement processes.

Fortifying the network perimeter to keep assumed external adversaries out is a tired, broken security architecture. There’s incompatibility between physical datacenter boundaries and virtual perimeters that come in various sizes and shapes and move at the speed of, well, clouds. Traditional security protocols won’t do and can’t keep up.

Join this interactive discussion to share ideas for:

• Approaching security in the cloud era, including strategies, tactics and deployment best practices
• Securing enterprise networks that fundamentally change over time
• Weeding through all of the cloud security solutions to create levels of depth, flexibility and scalability that inspires confidence for keeping attackers at bay

If you’d like to join this closed-door interactive discussion, please contact Sean Chalmers at sean.chalmers@evanta.com or 503-972-2166.

Data is a company’s greatest asset, and the asset most at risk today. Join this interactive session to discuss how CISOs can enable the business to leverage this asset safely, without security getting in the way.

This session explores:

• Applying risk management approaches to strike the right balance between data utilization and protection
• Keeping up with the organization’s rapid pace of technology adoption, including big data analytics and cloud data services, and leveraging recent innovations in data protection technologies
• Keeping up with the ever-changing needs of the business, and best practices for defining and enforcing data protection policies that don’t get in the way of the business
• Understanding the various regional and vertical regulatory domains related to data protection, such as GDPR, PCI and HIPAA

If you’d like to join this closed-door interactive discussion, please contact Sean Chalmers at sean.chalmers@evanta.com or 503-972-2166.