Cyber Leaders Group Chat: Hot Takes, Real Talk

What if you could peek into the real conversations cyber leaders are having behind closed doors?

This expert leadership panel pulls back the curtain on what security professionals are actually saying to each other: the tools they think are overrated, the investments that actually move the needle, and the uncomfortable truths about where most organizations get it wrong.  

We covered what’s working, what’s theater, and what every organization needs to prioritize right now. 

Whether you’re a business leader trying to separate signal from noise or a security professional wanting an honest temperature check on where the industry is heading, this session will deliver the straight talk you won’t find in vendor presentations. 

What You’ll Hear:

This unscripted discussion will explore the priorities, investments, and uncomfortable truths that security leaders are discussing:

• Real Priorities for Security Leaders: Hear what’s actually driving decisions and budget allocation when cyber professionals talk to each other—not what they’re saying in vendor meetings or board presentations.
• Honest Takes (What’s Overrated and What Isn’t): Get unfiltered perspectives on which security investments are delivering results and which ones are expensive security theater that auditors love but attackers laugh at.
• Uncomfortable Truths: Discover the gaps that keep coming up across organizations, the ones that are obvious to practitioners but somehow still aren’t getting fixed.
• Metrics and Frameworks That Win: Walk away with practical approaches for presenting security needs in terms that financial leadership understands and acts on instead of technical dashboards that generate concern but no resources.

Join security experts who know what’s working across hundreds of organizations and aren’t afraid to call out what isn’t. This is the conversation happening in practitioner communities, and you’re invited to listen in.

Stop Guessing and Start Strategizing:

This session serves business leaders who need to cut through vendor noise and security professionals who want an honest reality check on industry priorities.

The workshop is particularly valuable for organizations that…

• Are tired of implementing “next-gen” tools without seeing corresponding decreases in successful attacks or incident response times.
• Need to justify security budgets with business metrics that resonate with financial leadership, not just technical dashboards.
• Suspect their phishing training program is checking a compliance box rather than actually changing user behavior in measurable ways.
• Rely on annual pentests to satisfy auditors but rarely see those findings translate into sustained security improvements.
• Want to understand whether AI-powered security tools are worth the investment or just riding the AI hype wave.
• Need clearer board-level accountability for cybersecurity decisions instead of placing all responsibility on a single CISO.

Panelists Include:

• Nima Khamooshi: CISO at Dataprise
• Tim Miller: AVP, Cybersecurity at Dataprise
• Martin Badinelli: Director of Information Security at Dataprise