
Chicago CISO Community
Executive Summit
November 29, 2023 | Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile
November 29, 2023
Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile
Collaborate with your peers
Get together with Chicago's top CISOs to tackle shared business challenges and critical priorities facing your role today. Participate in this one-day, local program with peer-driven topics and interactive discussions with your true C-level peers.
Join your peers to discuss the most critical issues impacting CISOs today:
Quantifying the business's cyber-risk appetite and leveraging it to frame security investments
Improving the agility of security operating models to keep pace with organizational priorities
Enabling and protecting the business as technology and AI continue to evolve
Chicago CISO Governing Body
The Governing Body Co-Chairs shape the summit agenda, ensuring that all content is driven By CISOs, For CISOs®.
Governing Body Co-Chairs

Waqas Akkawi
SIRVA Worldwide
VP, CISO

Michelle Ayala
AZEK Company
CISO

JJ Markee
Danaher
Global Chief Information Security Officer

Paolo Vallotti
Tate & Lyle
CISO & VP of Operations

Angela Williams
UL Solutions
Global Chief Information Security Officer
What to Expect
Agenda
7:45am - 8:30am Registration & Breakfast
8:30am - 9:15am Keynote
Building Trust Creates Equity

Minda Harts
Workplace and Equity Consultant, Author
The Memo, LLC
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
9:15am - 9:40am Networking Break
9:40am - 10:25am Breakout Session
Journey to the Cloud – Planning, Partnering & Executing

Brian Palmer
Director, IT Security and Infrastructure
Ventas
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
9:40am - 10:25am Breakout Session
Defeating Ransomware — The Art of Negotiation in the Age of AI
Hosted by Sygnia

Oren Wortman
VP, Client Leadership | NA
Sygnia

Shaked Tanchuma Yogev
Director of Incident Response
Sygnia
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
9:40am - 10:25am Executive Boardroom
Strategic Pitfalls in Third-Party Risk Management
Hosted by RiskRecon, a Mastercard Company

Mark Nafe
Director, Solutions Consulting
RiskRecon - A MasterCard Company

Jay Gonzales
VP & CISO
James Hardie Industries

Brian McSweeney
Chief Cyber Risk Officer
Northern Trust
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
9:40am - 10:25am Executive Boardroom
Embracing AI — Pros, Cons, and the Challenge of Change
Hosted by CrowdStrike & Abnormal Security

Drex DeFord
Executive Strategist
CrowdStrike

Ryan Brichant
Field CTO
Abnormal Security

Darin Hurd
EVP & CISO
Guaranteed Rate

Joe Suareo
CISO
Restaurant Brands International
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
10:25am - 11:00am Networking Break
10:30am - 10:55am Peer-to-Peer Meetings
Peer-to-Peer Meetings
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.
11:00am - 11:45am Breakout Session
CISO by Design – An Interactive Workshop

Shefali Mookencherry
Chief Information Security Officer and Privacy Officer
University of Illinois at Chicago

Rajesh David
VP, Global CISO
Molex | Koch Industries
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
11:00am - 11:45am Breakout Session
Cybersecurity at Scale - Best of Breed vs. Standardization
Hosted by Palo Alto Networks

Gregory Richardson
Advisory CISO
Palo Alto Networks
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
11:00am - 11:45am Executive Boardroom
Unifying the Analyst Experience to Improve Threat Detection and Response
Hosted by IBM Security

Joseph Daw
Principal Security Architect, Americas
IBM

Nitin Raina
CISO
ThoughtWorks

Frank Yanan
SVP / Business Information Security Officer
Bank of America Limited
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
11:00am - 11:45am Executive Boardroom
Break the Attack Chain — The Importance of Integrated Threat Protection
Hosted by Proofpoint

Julie Farrell
Senior Regional Director
Proofpoint

Waqas Akkawi
VP, CISO
SIRVA Worldwide

Brian Ekkebus
CISO
USG
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
11:45am - 12:30pm Lunch Service
12:00pm - 12:30pm Networking
Rising Together — Empowered Women, Empower Women

Michelle Ayala
CISO
AZEK Company
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.
Apply to Participate
Apply to participate in the Chicago CISO Community Executive Summit.
Gartner facilitates exclusive, C-level communities by personally qualifying and understanding the priorities, challenges and interests of each member.
Our selective approach maintains the high quality of the network and ensures top-level discussions with peers from the world’s leading organizations.
Each application will be reviewed, and once your participation is confirmed, you will have access to year-round community programs.
Location
Venue & Accommodation
Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent MileParking
Self-Parking is available at the Rush-Ohio-Wabash Garage, for a discounted rate of $29 per vehicle.
Event Self-Park Instructions:
- Pull into the parking garage. When you reach the kiosk, push for a ticket, the gate will open, proceed to finding a parking spot.
- Keep the ticket that you pulled at the garage with you to the conference.
- You will be provided with a red discount $29 self-parking sticker, at the Evanta Registration Desk, that should be placed on top of the parking ticket. This will discount the rate for self-parking to $29.
- When you are ready to leave, you need to stop at one of the parking payment kiosks located in the lobby area of the garage (hotel has one too) and pay. You will scan the parking ticket with the sticker on it at the machine and the price to pay will be discounted to $29.
- When you exit the garage in your car, you will scan the parking ticket and the gate will open, and you may exit.
If you wish to Valet, you may do so at your own expense. Valet charges are $45 for up to 6 hours, and $70 for 6 to 24 hours.
The Valet station for the hotel is located at 541 North Rush Street.
A block of rooms has been reserved at the Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile at a reduced conference rate. Reservations should be made online or by calling 1-877-303-0104. Please mention Evanta CISO Executive Conference to ensure the appropriate room rate.
Deadline to book using the discounted room rate of $319 USD (plus tax) is November 6, 2023.
Community Program Manager
For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.