Name: Securing the Human Element: Why People Remain Cloud Security's Top Vulnerability in 2025
Start: 2025-11-05T13:00:00Z
End: 2025-11-05T13:00:35.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 4.8

This channel features presentations by leading experts in the field of information security. From application, computer, network and Internet security to access control management, data privacy and other hot topics, you will walk away with practical advice for your strategic and tactical information security initiatives.

Organizations excel at documenting incidents but fail catastrophically at remembering them. Between audits, hard-won lessons evaporate, cultural knowledge resets to zero and enterprises find themselves vulnerable to the same predictable risks that should have been eliminated months ago.

This session reframes security culture as a living control system where organizational memory becomes your strongest defense. Discover how to transform retrospectives into measurable feedback loops, quantify learning as risk reduction and embed institutional knowledge into governance frameworks that create compounding resilience rather than cyclical vulnerability.

Join Oksana Denesiuk, Senior Product Manager at Kaiser Permanente and ISSA Advisory Board Member, to explore proven methodologies for building unbreakable organizational memory.

Key Takeaways: 
- Track how lessons learned translate into behavioral change and improved security posture. 
- Build lasting organizational memory through structured post-incident processes that strengthen defenses over time.
- Measure how well your organization learns from incidents and translate that into reduced security risks.
- Transform retrospectives into measurable feedback loops that prevent incident recurrence. 
- Embed organizational knowledge into leadership and accountability models for sustained cultural transformation.

Transform Security Culture into Measurable Organizational Memory

Mergers and acquisitions create exponential cyber risk exposure, yet many organizations lack quantified risk frameworks to guide critical business decisions. As cyber threats evolve and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, executives need concrete data to balance growth opportunities against security investments.

Traditional risk assessments fail during rapid organizational change. This session reveals proven methodologies for translating cyber vulnerabilities into financial impact metrics that drive boardroom decisions. Learn to build communication frameworks that align security investments with business objectives while maintaining stakeholder confidence throughout complex organizational transitions.

Join Vincent Amanyi, Founder of Boleaum Inc, to explore actionable strategies for enterprise cyber risk quantification and communication.

Key Takeaways: 
- Develop risk appetite frameworks that identify, prioritize, and absorb organizational risks with minimal business disruption. 
- Master cyber risk quantification techniques that assign tangible dollar values to security threats across all business levels.
- Build structured communication models to effectively convey cyber risk criticality to diverse stakeholder groups. 
- Implement scalable cybersecurity benchmarking practices for growing organizations. 
- Create boardroom-ready risk reports that support strategic decision-making during M&A activities.

Quantify Cyber Risk Impact for Strategic M&A Growth

Breaches have become a daily reality. Dark web activities and emerging threat vectors outpace traditional defenses, creating blind spots that adversaries readily exploit. Without early warning systems, businesses remain vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that could have been prevented.

Effective Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) transforms raw intelligence into actionable insights that enable proactive defense strategies. This session demonstrates how to operationalize intelligence, map adversary tactics to business risks, and implement early warning systems that prevent breaches before they occur. Learn to distinguish signal from noise and convert threat intelligence into measurable risk reduction metrics that resonate with executive leadership.

Leverage Cyber Threat Intelligence for Proactive Risk Mitigation

Open-source software drives enterprise innovation, but unmanaged vulnerabilities create operational risks and regulatory exposure. As cyber threats evolve and compliance frameworks tighten, executives face mounting pressure to balance innovation speed with robust security governance.

Traditional approaches to OSS security often create friction between development teams and security requirements, leading to shadow IT practices and increased exposure. This session presents proven frameworks for integrating security into OSS workflows while maintaining developer productivity and meeting emerging regulatory demands like the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Join Yesenia Yser, Security Engineer and Open-Source Advocate, to explore enterprise-grade strategies for OSS risk management.



Key Takeaways: 

Implement governance frameworks that protect OSS dependencies without slowing development
Create shared accountability between security, procurement, and engineering teams
Apply SLSA, SBOM, and OpenSSF standards to build enterprise-wide security trust
Balance regulatory requirements with collaborative open source community practices 
Turn OSS security management into a strategic business differentiator

Securing Open-Source Dependencies at Enterprise Scale

The current data security and privacy protection landscape is awash with tools, acronyms, buzzwords that promise to make data breaches and privacy incidents a thing of the past. Yet hotel chains, healthcare providers, banks, department stores and even governments constantly fall victim to data breaches, ransomware or nation-state attacks. 

The plain truth is that tools are only as good as the people that use them and the processes that go with it. Two thousand years ago, the Roman empire had better military tools than the nations they conquered. Yet through time, the Romans fell to the barbarians and are merely remembered through their ruins. Likewise, companies with the latest and most buzzworthy technology implemented still manage to fall victim to attacks. 

In this presentation, industry thought leader Ralph Villanueva will tap into over 15 years’ experience of data security and privacy protection to show why ultimately, the people behind the tools and the processes they use matter more in securing your organization’s data. 

Key Takeaways:
 - How to best deploy tools in the most cost-effective way to optimize benefits.
 - How to best deploy tools to mitigate data security risks from internal and external threats. 
 - The importance of a balanced and holistic approach to data security that equally considers people, processes and technology.

Tools are Nothing: Why People and Process Matter More in Data Security and Privacy

Data security has entered a new era, one defined by AI-powered threats, expanding cloud ecosystems, and evolving global privacy regulations. 

This session presented by TD Bank's Pankul Chitrav explores the critical shifts reshaping how organisations must protect sensitive information in a boundaryless digital world. We will break down the top risks, the essential capabilities of modern security architectures, and the must-have tools for protecting data across endpoints, cloud platforms, and AI workflows. From zero trust to automated posture management and advanced data discovery, you’ll learn what’s required to stay ahead of adversaries and maintain compliance. Whether you’re modernising your security program or building one from the ground up, this talk equips you with the insights needed to create a future-ready data protection strategy for 2025 and beyond.

Future-Ready Data Protection: Securing Modern Data Ecosystems in an AI-Driven World

Cyberattacks are continuing at pace and we're regularly hearing of new data breaches. But who is responsible for ensuring the security of personal data? 

Traditional data protection approaches are failing against modern attack vectors. Organizations need future-ready strategies that go beyond compliance checkboxes to create resilient security frameworks. In this session, we'll explore the current risks to personal data & privacy and delve into the range of models that can be used to protect your organizations critical assets.

This webinar will take you through examples of recent data breaches, identifying the challenges being experienced, learning from what went wrong and how best organizations can plan for the future. Such planning will investigate current good practice, adding some “steroids” to them such that organizations can hopefully stay in front of the next “breach”!

Steve Yates – Chairman of the Resilience Association, will share frontline experience about critical data assets security and protection of user privacy.  

Key Takeaways:

- Be aware of the challenges being experienced in the protection of data security & privacy;
- Understand how best to plan your data resources and capacity to meet tomorrow’s defense;
- Discover the core organizational elements needed for the establishment of a strategic, tactical and operational solution

Strengthen Data Security Strategy for Tomorrow's Resilience Defense

AWS infrastructure offers robust native security mechanisms, but the shared responsibility model places critical configuration burdens on app owners. This creates gaps that attackers can actively exploit through misconfigurations, privilege escalation, and cross-service vulnerabilities which can compromise entire cloud deployments.

Security automation emerges as an essential defense strategy for threat modeling, enabling businesses to enforce security best practices from deployment through ongoing operations. Automated security controls provide continuous monitoring, real-time threat detection, and optimized remediation across AWS services. This ensures a consistent security posture while reducing human error and response times.

Join Ernesto Marquez, Founder and Project Director at Concurrency Labs, to explore proven AWS security automation strategies for threat mitigation.

Key Takeaways: 

- Implement automated security controls that enforce best practices across AWS services 
- Deploy continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection for multicloud environments 
- Configure automated remediation workflows for common security vulnerabilities 
- Integrate AWS security automation tools into comprehensive threat modeling frameworks 
- Establish governance policies that maintain security consistency across cloud deployments

Deploy Automated AWS Defenses for Threat Prevention

As cloud supply chain attacks escalate in sophistication, traditional SBOMs alone prove insufficient for comprehensive security. While SBOMs provide valuable component inventories, they lack runtime verification capabilities—creating a critical blind spot that malicious actors increasingly exploit. This gap between static analysis and runtime behavior represents one of the most significant vulnerabilities in modern cloud environments.

The "Bill of Behavior" (BoB) approach addresses this challenge by providing vendor-supplied profiles of expected runtime behaviors. Generated using eBPF technology, BoBs codify legitimate syscalls, file access patterns and network communications. This enables immediate anomaly detection without custom rule creation, allowing organizations to verify software integrity throughout the supply chain and during execution, dramatically reducing the attack surface while simplifying security operations.

Join Dr. Constanze Roedig, Key Researcher at SBA-Research and Founder of Fusioncore.ai, to discover how this emerging standard complements existing SBOM frameworks to create verifiable trust in your cloud ecosystem.

Key Takeaways:
- Understand how Software Bills of Behavior (SBoBs) create verifiable trust between vendors and clients
- Learn practical implementation strategies using existing OCI distribution standards
- Discover how BoBs significantly reduce attack surfaces across both runtime and supply chain vectors
- Explore immediate benefits of receiving vendor-supplied behavior profiles with software packages
- Discover how CNCF Kubescape allows anomaly detection out of the box

Beyond SBOMs: Runtime Verification for Bulletproof Cloud Supply Chains

Organizations are rapidly adopting AI technologies without fully understanding the security implications. This is creating unprecedented vulnerabilities in cloud environments. In turn, with AI accessible to all stakeholders, the human factor has become the weakest link in cybersecurity defense strategies.

This session addresses critical considerations for IT and cybersecurity leaders to balance business innovation with risk management. Learn how to establish ethical AI frameworks, implement proper access controls, and build awareness programs that protect your organization while enabling AI adoption.

Join Kathleen Mullin, vCISO and Consultant, to explore practical strategies for securing AI in cloud environments while maintaining business agility.

Key takeaways:

• Define clear RACI matrices for AI business risk ownership and accountability 
• Assess whether AI solutions truly meet business requirements vs. alternative approaches
• Establish data governance and access controls specifically for cloud-based AI systems 
• Develop comprehensive AI awareness programs for organizational stakeholders 
• Evaluate current and future cloud AI risks within your security framework

Considerations: Securing the Cloud And In Specific AI

Insider threats are one of the most challenging security risks in multicloud environments, where authorized users can exploit fragmented access controls and limited visibility across platforms. When organizations lack comprehensive oversight of user activities, data flows and privilege escalation paths, the risk posed by human error and malicious insiders is much greater.



Multicloud architectures amplify insider threat risks through inconsistent identity management, scattered audit trails, and complex permission structures that create blind spots for security teams. Strategic threat modeling designed around insider risks enables organizations to map user access patterns, identify privilege abuse scenarios, and implement behavioral monitoring across all cloud platforms before incidents occur.



Join Sandeep Tripathi, IT Solutions Designer at Daimler Truck AG, to discover systematic approaches for detecting and preventing insider threats in complex multicloud environments.



Key Takeaways: 

- Identify insider risk scenarios across cloud platforms using threat modelling frameworks
- Implement comprehensive user behavior analytics and cross-cloud activity monitoring
- Limit insider threat impact and lateral movement using zero-trust access controls.
- Develop incident response protocols for insider-driven security breaches
- Create governance frameworks for managing privileged access in multicloud environments

Mitigate Insider Threats in Multicloud Through Strategic Modeling

Every minute your cloud infrastructure grows, it creates new entry points for potential attacks. As organizations rush to embrace cloud innovations, they're unknowingly building digital labyrinths where traditional security measures fall short.

Cloud security threats are often perceived as purely technical challenges, but the human factor remains one of the most significant and underestimated risks. Misconfigurations, weak passwords, phishing attacks, and inadequate training open doors to breaches even in sophisticated environments. Employees inadvertently expose sensitive data through social engineering, while administrators overlook crucial updates. Insider threats pose significant risks when cloud systems are accessible from anywhere.

Join Jyotirmayee Pradeep Kumar, Vice President of Cloud DevOps at a leading global bank, to explore human factors in cloud security threats.

Key Takeaways: 
- Human error as the leading cause of cloud security breaches 
- Phishing attacks and social engineering threat vectors 
- Managing insider threats in distributed cloud environments 
- Essential security awareness training and culture development 
- Zero Trust architecture implementation strategies

Managing Human Risk in Cloud Security Operations

AI technologies are simultaneously completely transforming business operations and creating new security vulnerabilities that cannot be addressed by technical safeguards alone. When implementing AI-driven solutions, human oversight is the biggest differentiator between secure innovation and catastrophic data breaches. As such, human intervention is both the biggest vulnerability and most significant defense in organizational security architectures.

To address this challenge, IT leaders can build a security champions program—a network of engaged employees who understand AI-specific threats and serve as frontline defenders. This group bridges the gap between security teams and other business units. They spread security awareness throughout the organization while maintaining operational efficiency.

Join Vincent Amanyi to discover proven strategies for empowering a team of security champions who can help safeguard your organization's AI initiatives and digital assets.

Key Takeaways:

- Learn to assess AI-related security risks across all business functions
- Design a people-centric security strategy that combines technical controls and human intelligence
- Establish and structure an effective Security Champions Committee with clear roles and responsibilities

Fortifying the Human Firewall: Cultivating Security Champions in Today's AI Landscape

In today's threat landscape, where the average data breach costs organizations $9 million, your employees represent both your greatest vulnerability and your strongest defense. As AI-powered threats become more sophisticated and remote work expands the attack surface, traditional security awareness approaches are failing to create lasting behavioral change. The human element remains implicated in over 80% of breaches, yet most training programs still focus on compliance checkboxes rather than cultivating security champions.

Effective security awareness requires a strategic approach that addresses psychological barriers, leverages behavioral science and creates sustainable security habits. By reimagining how we engage employees—from executive leadership to frontline staff—organizations can transform their security culture from a perceived burden into a competitive advantage that measurably reduces incident rates and response times.

Join Ralph Villanueva, with 15+ years leading enterprise security awareness programs, to discover proven methodologies that transform employee behavior.

Key takeaways:

- Implement psychological triggers that convert passive training participants into active security defenders
- Design role-specific awareness programs that address the unique risks of different departments
- Measure training effectiveness beyond completion rates with behavior-based security metrics
- Secure executive buy-in by connecting awareness initiatives to tangible business outcomes
- Deploy just-in-time learning techniques that deliver training when employees are most receptive

Transforming Human Risk: 10 Battle-Tested Strategies for Modern Security Awareness

Organizations are investing heavily in advanced security tools. But the most critical—and vulnerable—component of cybersecurity defense is people. As AI-driven attacks and quantum-era risks emerge, the gap between technological capabilities and human cognitive readiness threatens to widen dramatically.

Security professionals face unprecedented pressure when responding to incidents. Even with robust detection and recovery tools, factors like stress, fatigue and decision paralysis can significantly increase recovery times and amplify damage. This presentation introduces an expanded MTTR formula incorporating the "Human Cognitive Factor"—a groundbreaking approach that addresses the psychological dimensions of security response that technology alone cannot solve.

Join Sandra Estok (Founder & CEO, Way2Protect) to discover why preparing employees will determine your organization's survival in the 2026 threatscape.

Key Takeaways:

- Master the expanded MTTR formula that quantifies how human cognitive factors impact recovery timelines
- Identify early warning signs of team cognitive impairment before they compromise your security posture
- Implement practical strategies to build psychological resilience and decision-making clarity under pressure
- Establish metrics that measure human performance alongside technical metrics for comprehensive security assessment
- Learn how leadership decisions about culture, team structure, and psychological safety directly influence threat response effectiveness

Strengthening Your Human Firewall: Closing Cognitive Security Gaps Before 2026

Both endpoint security and endpoint management are becoming more challenging, largely driven by an increasingly complex threat landscape and a greater number (and assortment) of both managed and unmanaged endpoint devices. This, combined with an overabundance of tools deployed to deal with these threats and devices, has created a false sense of security and the inability to process all the data being collected.

 To combat this, organizations are making efforts to integrate the teams, tools, and processes involved, and these efforts are having a positive impact on visibility and awareness. Similarly, organizations are eager to adopt new tools like Autonomous Endpoint Management to help them achieve their goals.

In this session from Endpoint Management and Security Gabe Knuth, you’ll learn both what research reveals about the challenges facing organizations, the risks associated with the status quo, and the path forward to improving overall endpoint management and security.

Overcoming Increasing Endpoint Security & Management Challenges

As organizations continue to accelerate their cloud adoption, the 2026 threatscape reveals an increasingly complex and dynamic environment. Attackers are leveraging AI-driven exploits, supply chain vulnerabilities, and sophisticated cloud-native attack vectors to target critical infrastructure and sensitive data. Meanwhile, regulatory landscapes and compliance requirements are rapidly evolving, demanding stronger governance and resilience strategies.

This session explores the top cloud security threats projected for 2026, including identity compromise, API exploitation, misconfiguration risks, and multi-cloud visibility challenges. It also highlights forward-looking defense strategies, from zero-trust architectures and autonomous remediation to AI-powered detection and response. Participants will gain actionable insights into building a proactive cloud security posture that not only addresses today’s risks but anticipates tomorrow’s challenges.

Emerging Risks, Evolving Defenses and the Future of Cloud Security

As organizations rely on more critical cloud workloads every day, there's often uncertainty about who's responsible for protecting what. The shared responsibility model is clear in theory but gets murky in practice, leaving gaps that can expose your data when you least expect it.

Join us for an honest conversation between Rubrik and AWS as they break down the shared responsibility model that every cloud customer needs to understand. We'll cut through the confusion about who protects what, reveal the most common gaps that leave organizations exposed, and share practical strategies to ensure your data survives the next cyber incident.

From Confusion to Confidence: Is Your Data Really Protected? A Fireside Chat on Customer Cloud Data Protection

Navigating the Latest Wave of Cloud Security Threats

As organizations accelerate cloud adoption, sophisticated security technologies often create a false sense of protection while the most significant threats emerge from within. Human behaviour continues to be the weakest link in cloud security, not due to malicious intent, but through everyday mistakes that inadvertently expose critical systems.

When they create friction, security measures designed to protect can inadvertently increase risk as users will find shortcuts to achieve their legitimate objectives. This session explores the psychology behind user decision-making and reveals how threat actors exploit human nature to bypass cloud defenses, turning legitimate business processes into attack vectors.

Join Simon Ratcliffe, independent management & technology consultant, to discover practical strategies for human-centered cloud security.

Key Takeaways:

- Identify psychological triggers that make users vulnerable to cloud-based attacks 
- Recognize how security friction drives risky user behaviors and workarounds
- Design user-centric security that reduces human error without compromising protection 
- Develop indicators to detect insider threats before they escalate 
- Build security awareness programs that create lasting behavioral change

Securing the Human Element: Why People Remain Cloud Security's Top Vulnerability in 2025

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Securing the Human Element: Why People Remain Cloud Security's Top Vulnerability in 2025

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