Before each Innovate Cybersecurity Summit, we ask every attending CISO and security executive to name their three most‑active initiatives. No categories, no vendor influence, no leading questions—just where their attention and budgets are flowing today.
We polled more than 160 CISOs and senior security executives attending our upcoming Innovate Cybersecurity Summit. The following five initiatives are the result – a preview of conversations to come this next week in Scottsdale.
1. AI Governance & Security
The single most‑frequent priority is how to govern and protect AI. Attendees are moving past “we need an AI policy” to actually building governance frameworks, risk‑assessment processes and technical controls for generative‑AI models. The discussion now includes model‑risk assessments, AI‑specific threat hunting and the emerging need for “AI guardrails” that can stop adversaries from weaponizing the same technology.
2. Zero‑Trust Architecture
Zero‑trust—micro‑segmentation, ZTNA and continuous verification—is the next biggest focus. Respondents are consolidating network, identity and workload controls into a single verification‑always model. The goal is to replace legacy perimeter defenses with a fabric that can keep pace with cloud‑first, hybrid environments.
3. Identity & Access Management (IAM)
Identity remains a foundational, yet still unresolved, challenge. Executives are expanding IAM programs to cover non‑human identities (service accounts, AI agents), modernizing identity governance and deploying detection capabilities that surface anomalous credential use. Every new cloud workload or AI service adds a fresh identity exposure, so scaling IAM is now a top‑tier priority.
4. Data Security & Governance
Data‑centric controls—DLP, data classification and data‑loss prevention—continue to dominate. With AI models ingesting massive datasets, organizations are also looking at DSPM (Data‑Security Posture Management) as a more architectural answer. The core problem—knowing where sensitive data lives and stopping its unauthorized movement—is still unsolved for most respondents.
5. Cloud Security & SaaS Protection
As workloads migrate to public clouds and SaaS, security teams are investing in CSPM/SSPM tools, secure migration frameworks and cloud‑native detection. The data show a strong desire to gain visibility across multi‑cloud environments and to embed security controls directly into the development pipeline.
These five conversations will set the agenda in Scottsdale
As AI reshapes identity, data and cloud workloads simultaneously, the question we’ll wrestle with is: are security programs being rebuilt around that new reality—or merely patched on top of legacy structures? We look forward to the debate, the collaboration and the insights that only an in‑person gathering can spark.
Initiative data was drawn from 160+ CISOs and security leaders surveyed across our Innovate Cybersecurity Summit attendees. The conversation continues this weekend in Scottsdale, AZ on October 4-6.
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