Join Us For Our Hybrid Dallas Assembly!

Dallas, TX, April 28, 2022 - Apex Assembly is excited to be bringing together 60+ CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, CISOs and other Divisional Leaders from F500 and Global 2000 Enterprise organizations for our Hybrid Assembly using Bizzabo as the event success software to create a more immersive, successful experience.

We will unite the Dallas-based executives for a day of panels, thought leadership discussions, a networking lunch and more. Apex will be using the Virtual Platform to bring together a more national audience through live streams to engage and join in the discussion.?

In collaboration with industry-leading speakers and our sponsors Source Defense, Digital Realty, Sysdig, IBM, TigerGraph, Armis, Opsramp, Traceable AI, Pepperdata, Axonius, Okta, and Talkdesk we will examine the challenges and concentrate on the most pressing issues that lie ahead in 2022 and 2023.

Summit Sponsors Include

Panels & Sessions

We will kick off the day with Opening Remarks by our Master of Ceremonies, Richard Warner, CEO of Aware Force.?

The Opening Keynote Panel on, "Top Trends & Challenges for CIOs & CISO's in 2022" will follow. Joining the panel is Varun Gadhok, SVP and CIO, with Surgery Partners, James Binford, Director, BISO of Humana, Gertrude Van Horn, SVP & CIO, with NCH Corporation, and Ravi Nemalikanti, CTO, Digital Banking, with NCR Corporation.

Next up, IBM will be giving the Keynote Presentation on “Gear up for technology modernization with AIOps” with Chris Bailey, Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect with IBM.

Today’s increasingly complex application estate combined with an ongoing talent shortage challenge means that the traditional IT approaches are not enough. IT leaders are under the seemingly impossible pressure of driving operational excellence while accelerating products to market, meeting growing customer expectations, and assuring performance of their business-critical applications.? Join us as we discuss IBM AIOps fuels automation that brings real-time insights together with trusted actions, enabling IT to be proactive -to find opportunities early, continuously innovate, get ahead of problems, and streamline resolution

Sysdig, a Disrupter Presenter, will speak on “Managing Cloud Risk without Slowing Application Delivery” with Brian Carlton, Director of Sales Engineering with Sysdig. As organizations move workloads to the cloud they realize their software development approach needs to radically change. Securing the cloud requires a total re-think as well. Although security teams still need to manage access rights, fix vulnerabilities, and detect runtime threats, the techniques have evolved. Learn how the largest financial services, media and software companies address cloud security. You will gain insight into the top security challenges and pragmatic techniques to manage cloud risk without slowing down application delivery. Brian Carlton, Director of Sales Engineering, will share our customers’ best practices for securing containers, Kubernetes and cloud services.

Following that, Digital Realty will speak on “Defying (Data) Gravity: How to Improve your Enterprise Hybrid IT Security Posture” given by Joe Neumann, Director of Business Resilience and Business Information Security Officer, Digital Realty. By 2025, almost half of the world’s stored data could reside in the public cloud.1 By the same year, it’s estimated that over 463 exabytes of data will be created every day.2 The explosion of data growth and data gravity raises security concerns and can expose points of vulnerability. A proactive cybersecurity strategy has become an essential part of distributed IT environments that comprise on-premise and cloud-based workflows, applications and systems.?

In addition, global cybercrime costs are expected to reach over $10 trillion annually by 2025.3 Persistent cyber threats further elevate the importance of a hardened security posture. Especially since enterprises are fast becoming the world’s data steward. By 2025, 80% of data worldwide will reside in enterprises4. This will continue to increase the volume of data that needs to be aggregated and stored. A pervasive data-centric IT architecture that securely optimizes data exchange and enables connected data communities has become mission critical. This allows for integration between core, cloud and edge through cyber resilient centers of data exchange.?

A data-centric, risk-based hybrid IT security posture also needs to be adaptable and ever-evolving for business continuity – to strengthen incident prevention, initiate early detection and expedite the response to attacks.?

Following that, Source Defense, will give a talk on “Addressing the Blind-Side in 3rd party risk, the Client-Side” given by Matthew McGuirk, Solution Architect, Office of the CTO at Source Defense.?

With all of your focus and investment on 3rd party risk management, there is likely still a blind-side that remains unaddressed. It is an area that should be moved to the top of your priority list - both for its potential to cause material losses in the form of response costs and fines and judgements, and for the ease in which it can be mitigated. It is a risk introduced by the 3rd party vendors you rely upon (and the nth parties they work with) to power and enhance your website. The threat of JavaScript based attacks - click-jacking, digital skimming, formjacking, defacement, "Magecart" - exists for any organization collecting sensitive data or conducting transactions through their web properties. Attacks of this type have done damage to some of the biggest brands in the world - costing household names like British Airways tens of millions - and they happen by the hundreds per month. Already in 2022, we've seen headlines of major client-side attacks like the one that hit Segway - potentially impacting nearly a million consumers.

This is an area of exposure introduced through your own code, and by your partners, that can only be addressed at the client-side. It remains widely unaddressed, as focus in website security to this point has been on securing the server side.?

Join us for an exploration of the threat of these attacks, real-world examples of the material impact they have caused, and dialogue on the approaches to mitigating this risk with pros and cons of each.???

Next, TigerGraph, will speak on “Accelerate AI projects with Graph Analytics – a faster path to production and shorter time to value” given by Steve Matthews, Sales Engineering Manager with TigerGraph. Gartner famously stated in 2017 that 85% of data science projects fail. Many reasons have been put forward for the dismal success rate, and most commentators agree that the cultural obstacles are the most intractable: everything takes too long, and businesses can’t afford to wait. Too often, initiatives lose momentum and executive sponsors lose patience.??

Graph analytics is not just technically powerful, it also breaks down cultural barriers because it reflects the way people think, how we see patterns in data, and how we use those patterns to inform our decisions and actions. Perhaps most importantly, graphs enable business users to get started with the imperfect data that they have, not the perfectly cleansed data that they would like.

?Traceable AI will give a presentation on “API Security from 0 to 360” given by James Locus, Evangelist & Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Traceable AI. Traceable AI enables security and engineering teams to move in lock-step with fast-moving API-driven applications, enabling purpose-built API protection that blocks sophisticated API cyberattacks.? Powered by machine learning, Traceable AI delivers enterprise-grade API Security to your cloud-native applications.

Talkdesk, will follow with a presentation on “Activate your CX to drive business growth: A blueprint to rethink your CX strategy” given by Clayton Lougee, Director, CX Strategy with Talkdesk.?

Technology’s complexity and impact on customer experience (CX) is accelerating, driven by recent years’ increased demand for contact center support and digital interactions. But how do you gain visibility into and measure technology performance and its impact on your business? Join Clayton Lougée, director of CX Strategy at Talkdesk, as he guides you through a customizable blueprint to help you define and then execute a CX strategy that delivers optimal outcomes for your organization.

Next, a Fireside Chat on "State of Security & Risk in 2022: Empowering CISOs and their teams'' moderated by Matthew McGuirk, Solution Architect, Office of the CTO at Source Defense. Joining the conversation we have Aravind Kashyap, CIO & CISO of Balfour, Jason Walker, Director, Cyber Security with American Airlines and Alain Espinosa Sr. Business Information Security Officer with Rent-A-Center.

Kicking off the afternoon we have, Opsramp with a presentation on "Save time and resources, improve service delivery, and automate with OpsRamp'' given by Bill Talbot, Chief Marketing Officer with Opsramp.?

Managing modern hybrid environments at scale is tougher than ever before. IT teams struggle with achieving unified visibility into their environments and with automating their operations. The complexity and velocity of change has grown beyond human scale to manage effectively. With OpsRamp, operations teams can harness Hybrid Observability, AIOPs and Automation, all from a single platform, to save time and resources, improve their service delivery, and automate!?

Next, Pepperdata will give a talk on "Transform the Performance of your Hyperscale Distributed Systems" given by Patty Collins, Vice President of Sales, Cloud Performance Optimization with Pepperdata.?

Whether it is lack of visibility into application needs and resource utilization; spending too much on cloud bills, or hundreds of developers calling on you to fix a problem, Pepperdata can help you maximize the productivity of your modern big data initiative with a scalable performance optimization solution for data science and AI/ML pipelines. Pepperdata can help you automatically improve resource usage in real-time unlike passive observability solutions that rely on recommendations and manual tuning and do not scale, Pepperdata provides an automated, scalable solution that helps customers optimize big data performance and meet the demands of their analytics and big data stakeholders.

Following that, we have a CXO Panel on the topic “Keys to Unlock your Cloud & Infrastructure Journey” moderated by Chetan Raval, CIO of JW Logistics. Joining the discussion we have Srini Malkapuram, Head of Enterprise Architecture with Wabtec, Brad Smith, Director of Cloud Architecture with Tenent Healthcare, Shawn Burch, Executive IT Director of Sony Pictures, Marlin Todd, Director, Infrastructure & Cloud Operations with Signify Health, and Brian Sledge, Head of Cloud Enablement Engineering of Morgan Stanley.

After a short break, we have the CXO Fireside Chat on “The Future Enterprise AI: Data Analytics, Data Science and Machine Learning.” Moderating this session will be Sankar Bala, Former Chief Data Officer, Caliber Home Loans and he will be joined by Ty Brewer, Chief Digital Officer, History Maker Homes, Aamer Charania, Head of Applied Machine Learning with Best Buy, Praveen Tandra, Director - Data Architecture & Engineering for Capital One and Baiju Thakker, EVP, Chief Technology Officer for Synergy One Lending.?

We will end the day with the Closing CXO Panel on “The Role you play in Diversity, Inclusion, and Leadership” moderated by Amy Czuchlewski, Former VP Engineering of Nickelodeon. Joining the panel is Shyamala Narayanaswam, VP Engineering with Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers, Joan Holman, CIO of Clark Hill PLC, Rebecca Meyer, Sr. Director, IT with Kelly-Moore Paints, and Alka Siddiqui, Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture & Applications Platforms with Raytheon Technologies.

You can also find our partners Okta and Axonius located in our Networking Hub throughout the course of the day.??

Following the Assembly, Armis will host a private executive Post-Assembly dinner where they will discuss “The Tsunami of Devices - How is the World Changing Around Us” led by Ziv Dines, Chief Technology Officer with Armis followed by an evening of networking and conversation.

Through these thought leadership sessions, panels and live chats we will bring to the forefront today's top successes, challenges and focus areas for CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, CISOs and other Divisional Leaders in the enterprise.?

Apex Assembly specializes in bringing together technology leaders from the world’s largest companies to discuss technology trends and focus on solving their biggest technology challenges. By uniting exclusive C-level communities, Apex offers unparalleled opportunities to mindshare in a secure environment and collaborate on industry trends, challenges and successes. Headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, Apex Assembly hosts regional and national events focused on open discussion and education to assist technology leaders in building lasting business relationships. Learn more at https://apexassembly.com