As we wrap up Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we wanted to share takeaways from our most recent Cybersecurity Summit on October 9th.
This year’s theme reflected the urgency and opportunity facing today’s organizations as they adopt AI. As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, AI is both a powerful ally and a formidable challenge. This summit reflected our commitment to empowering IT leaders, CISOs, and practitioners with the knowledge, tools, and strategies needed to stay ahead.
Three Key Talk Tracks:
Every session at this year’s summit centered around one of three guiding questions:
- How can I use AI to protect my organization?
- How do I fight back against AI-powered threats?
- As we adopt AI, how do we secure it?
Hot Topics and Emerging Themes
Throughout the day, several discussions resonated strongly with attendees and reflected the real-world challenges organizations are navigating:
- Building Data Resilience in the Age of AI: Discussions highlighted how organizations can strengthen data protection through continuous visibility, automated risk assessments, and the ability to recover from incidents without disruption.
- Evolving Security Operations: AI’s greatest impact lies in operationalizing cybersecurity, using intelligent automation to filter alerts, prioritize threats, and integrate human judgment where it’s needed most. The next generation of security operations will combine machine-driven scale with human context.
- Proactive Defense Against AI-Driven Threats: A key session highlighted how Purple Teaming bridges the gap between traditional defensive and offensive security approaches, uniting teams around exploitable risks that truly matter. By shifting the focus from vulnerabilities to breach exposures, organizations can prioritize faster, more effective remediation.
- Governance and Responsible AI Use: As organizations experiment with AI tools, establishing clear policies, guardrails, and due diligence processes is essential. Several sessions explored how to develop AI usage policies that consider data input, model behavior, and intellectual property protection.
- Securing the Data Layer: Many conversations returned to the idea that data, not tools, is the foundation of security. Protecting sensitive data across SaaS, cloud, and hybrid environments ensures that AI innovations remain safe, compliant, and aligned with business priorities.
- The Future of the Endpoint: A forward-looking topic examined how the definition of the “endpoint” is changing, and how embedded security, automation, and user-centric design are creating safer, smarter workspaces for modern enterprises.
We were also joined by industry experts from Cisco, Rubrik, NetApp, Arctic Wolf, Palo Alto, Island.io, Cyera, Nile, and Zscaler to get updates on how they’re leveraging AI in their organizations to keep their customers secure.
The event closed with a Fireside Chat among regional CISOs and cybersecurity leaders about the evolving role of leadership in an AI-driven era, as well as a networking reception and book signing with our Keynote speaker, Andy Ellis.
What Our Attendees Had to Say:
This event was a great advancement in knowledge to the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape and the necessary actions/pre-cautions we must take to defend ourselves. – Andrew, Security Analyst, Intentsify
Excellent event! Great opportunity to hear and interact with leaders and companies pushing the envelope of innovation in Cybersecurity. I learned a lot, as usual. – Shubhro Sen, Executive Director, UMass Boston
A great and well-orchestrated event with meaningful, up-to-date content that practitioners can apply. – Founder and Principal Consultant, Cyber Cedar Advisors
AQ Cybersecurity Summit was a great event to help gain new views and ideas for the continually involving cybersecurity world. – Sr. Network Engineer, Riverstone International Insurance
Looking Ahead:
We’re grateful to all who joined us this year and look forward to continuing these conversations as we prepare for next year’s summit, happening on Thursday, October 15th, 2026.