Insights from award-winning IT projects, presented by CIOs
Full agenda coming soon – check back for updates.
2025 agenda
Wednesday, September 17
Collect your special 20th Edition CIO100 Memorabilia
Join Grant ‘Axe’ Rawlinson as he shares his extraordinary journey from Singapore to New Zealand by human power, revealing how boldness and originality—not conformity—drive true leadership. Discover the mindsets, skill sets, and lived experiences that empower CIOs to lead with courage, curiosity, and conviction in an increasingly uncertain world.
Leaders in AI-Native Networking by Juniper Networks
Cloud Data Security Supremos by Netskope
Foundry Global Team, Special Invitees
Business Innovators in Gen AI and Cloud by AWS
Zero Trust Mavens by ACPL
Data Security Maestros by Varonis
Thursday, September 18
As AI reshapes how businesses operate — from development workflows to customer engagement — organizations face a critical challenge: how to secure innovation without slowing it down. From Shadow AI and model sprawl to data leakage and uncontrolled agent behavior, traditional security tools aren’t built for the pace or complexity of today’s AI-driven environments. At the same time, expanding attack surfaces, hybrid work, and API ecosystems introduce new vulnerabilities across the digital landscape. CIOs are building strategies for securing AI environments and workflows, protecting original content, enabling secure AI development, and governing emerging tech responsibly.
Businesses today must innovate quickly while staying secure and compliant — but complex networks often slow them down. AlgoSec simplifies security policy management by providing end-to-end visibility, intelligent automation, and seamless integration across hybrid environments.
As cyber threats grow in sophistication, the Security Operations Center (SOC) sits at the heart of enterprise defense. However, traditional SOC models are being challenged by:
- AI-driven threats that increase attack speed and complexity.
- The shift to cloud-first and hybrid infrastructures that expand the attack surface.
- Talent shortages and burnout among analysts dealing with high volumes of alerts.
Vaguely defined, minimally incentivized, and often unending, the zero-trust journey is notably challenging and complex for most organisations. The comprehensive nature of zero trust deployments, the level of pushback from department heads, and the extremely long time necessary for meaningful ROI are key factors in CIOs’ zero trust frustrations. Moreover, that each enterprise environment is unique necessitates a lack of specific implementation details for zero trust, as compliance, geographies, verticals, and the nature of partners and others who need access to an organization’s systems can all vary wildly, in addition to on-prem, cloud, remote site, IoT, and legacy particulars.
The AI bubble has propelled everyone inside the tech world scrambling into a frenzy. But there’s no bubble and AI is in fact all good for business. It is super critical to focus on the kernel of truth, evaluate the market reality, maintain due diligence, utilize the expertise of your tech partners and team teams, and learn from each other as the technology evolves. Yogesh Gupta in the editorial keynote based on Foundry’s extensive CIO surveys, will discuss and share 5 lessons learnt or be learnt on AI for CIOs, their teams, tech partners and the IT ecosystem.
Building on his expedition story, Axe challenges CIOs to embrace uncertainty as a strategic advantage. In a world where standing still means falling behind, this session explores why stepping into the unknown is not a risk—but a necessity—for relevance, innovation, and growth.
The computer has undergone a timeless journey of miniaturization, from planet-scale mainframes to the pocket-sized device. Yet, the user interface for business software remained stuck in the ’80s, forcing users to navigate complex, fragmented apps. This keynote explores the next great act of miniaturization in enterprise software: the shift from apps to conversational agents.
Traditional network management and operation methods, often reactive and resource-intensive, struggle to keep pace with the ever-increasing demands for constant connectivity, optimal performance, and proactive security.
The experience-first approach prioritizes user outcomes by leveraging AI-native networking technologies, which integrate artificial intelligence directly into network infrastructure, enabling real-time optimization and more responsive, adaptive systems. This methodology is designed to generate tangible and measurable impacts across operations. By focusing on measurable results, enhanced performance, reliability, and efficiency become visible through key metrics, establishing a direct link between networking innovations and business outcomes.
“Embracing Secure AI with Zscaler” delves into how organizations can confidently leverage generative AI while maintaining rigorous security standards. The presentation highlights best practices for securely adopting both public and private AI environments. Attendees will gain insights into Zscaler’s robust capabilities for detecting and preventing AI-driven cyberattacks, ensuring seamless and secure integration of AI technologies to foster innovation, operational efficiency, and business resilience.
The stage is set for former technology leaders who have spent decades in the technology spectrum/ space to converse about their vast experience, the qualities that make for an adaptable leader and the wisdom they would impart to newer CIOs embarking on this journey.
How does the widespread AI adoption impact cybersecurity measures for an organization? Learn how Artificial Intelligence can augment the defense infrastructure of an organization, in this Fireside Chat between Diwakar Dayal, SentinelOne and Yogesh Gupta, Foundry.
As enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journey, data becomes the most valuable and vulnerable asset. This session will explore how CIOs can enable business innovation while ensuring robust protection of sensitive information across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments leading to Data Security Everywhere.
Businesses have been leveraging Cloud to provide scalable and flexible IT infrastructure and reduce the lag and costs tied to legacy systems. Zak Murad takes the stage to educate on how the advent of AI and LLM can augment Cloud operations to harmonize business operations and bring speed and agility.
With Artificial Intelligence swiftly taking over, human skillsets are under the spotlight for growth that matches the technology. Learn how India’s CIOs are tackling this new con in The Captain’s Panel, ‘Women in Tech: Empowering Human Skillsets for the AI Wave’, moderated by Cathy O’Sullivan and graced by India’s most illustrious panellists.
Learn more about how data, not AI, is your competitive edge.Most enterprise data remains dark, unstructured, and underutilized, where complexity, uncertain ROI, skill gaps, and risks hinder AI readiness. Through customer case studies, Varun will discuss how to unlock the power ofinformation, ensuring it’s protected, connected, and activated across its ecosystem to createactionable insights from unstructured data.
Khushbu Jain navigates the tricky lanes of Data Protection law as he highlights the rights and the liabilities of companies and reveals the urgency of organizational preparedness in his Visionary Keynote on Data security and the DPDP Act, and how CIOs can tailor their practices according to the new rules.
We are now in the AI Everywhere Chapter, and it is interesting to see how enterprises will evolve in this era, and the new capabilities needed for AI workloads.The proliferation of AI has boosted the power of low code platforms by elevating developer experience, enabling closed loop self-healing governance and significantly expanding the possibilities for businesses. The power of advanced AI is delivering disruptive gains, including increased productivity, enhanced security, and improved quality and performance for organizations. However, there needs to be extra focus on the network infrastructure to ensure AI is implemented, run and delivered seamlessly across the infra, clouds and end devices. How can CIOs harness the remarkable productivity benefits of AI in networking, without introducing any additional risks/ security vulnerabilities into the business?
The typical organization’s attack surface has vastly increased in recent years, driven by such trends as the explosion of entitlements, machine identities, and cloud expansion projects. In fact, the average organization has 351 exploitable attack paths. While least privilege is a fundamental security principle, organizations tend to approach it in a highly piecemeal way that entails a multitude of different toolsets across the enterprise. The more piecemeal the approach, the more security gaps, operational inefficiencies and higher costs, integration/tool compatibility issues, and complexity in addressing compliance standards. Organizations clearly need a more streamlined approach to implementing least privilege across their stack. One that layers least privilege across identities, endpoints, applications, sessions, on-premises, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS.
AI agents have taken over as perhaps the most hyped technologies over the past year, after the excitement over generative AI seemed to sink under the weight ofunrealistic expectations.
AI agents take gen AI a step further byemphasizing operational decision-makingrather than content generation. With AI agents popping up in so many situations and platforms, organizations interested in the technology may find it difficult to know where to start. A handful of use cases have so far risen to the top, according to AI experts.
As AI transforms data ecosystems, CIOs face mounting challenges in ensuring security and privacy. This roundtable explores governance frameworks, regulatory compliance, ethical AI deployment, and risk mitigation strategies to safeguard sensitive information while enabling innovation. Join us to discuss actionable insights and collaborative approaches for building resilient, trustworthy AI-driven enterprises.
Friday, September 19
This topic moves beyond the audio and video equipment. It frames the boardroom and executive briefing centres as mission-critical command centres where high-stakes decisions are made. The discussion should focus on how technology must be utterly reliable, secure from cyber threats, and simple enough to be operated by a busy C-suite executive without a technical manual. The goal is to position the offices/boardroom as a strategic asset that enhances governance, decision-making, and corporate image, especially for multinational Indian companies dealing with global partners.
As business increasingly relies on technology for its success, how does it transform the role of a CIO? Foundry’s seasoned editors take the stage for a Fireside Chat, discussing how CIOs have stepped into their multi-faceted leadership era.
Alert notifications aren’t the solution — they are just the starting point of Threat hunting. Attackers don’t sleep, and neither should your defenses. Join us to explore how Managed Detection & Response (MDR) empowers organizations to Detect threats early, defend with expert-led actions, and Defeat advanced attacks — all without overwhelming your internal teams.
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, the volume of raw data generated from edge devices, core infrastructure, and cloud platforms continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. The wide range of sources calls for a more strategic and resilient approach to data protection and management. However, edge environments, which are often where much of the raw data for AI originates, are still one of the most overlooked areas in many protection strategies today. In this session, Synology will share how organizations can build a cost-effective and scalable data resilience framework.
As AI moves from hype to reality, Ankit Bose, Head, NASSCOM AI, takes us through the CIO mindset of leveraging Artificial Intelligence beyond concept and using it to produce tangible gains in business, operational efficiency and significantly, the bottom line, tackling challenges and grasping opportunities in this dynamic.
In a ransomware attack, it’s not just your data that’s at risk. The first thing attackers go after is your identity infrastructure — Active Directory, service accounts, authentication tokens — because if they own identity, they own your environment.
“Think ofidentityas the keys to your digital kingdom. If those are stolen or damaged, even if the castle is fine, you’re still locked out.”
The ability torecover your identity services is one of the first and most critical steps in cyber resilience and operational recovery. Without it, you can’t securely bring your business back online after a cyberattack or disaster
Rubrik’s Identity Threat Detection and Recovery (ITDR) is designed specifically to address this challenge — enabling you to detect compromise, restore identity systems, and accelerate recovery after a cyber event.
Esteemed women CIOs, helming their domains of tech leadership with flair, explore in this fireside chat how the playbook is being re-written by AI and other emerging technology, how IT leadership has transformed over the decades, and the future of tech as they navigate opportunities and combat challenges in this era.
Cybersecurity is like a game of chess – organization vs attacker, and cybersecurity is the good side’s strongest defence. Influential will discuss how the parameters of cybersecurity are transforming with the introduction of AI, and the confluence of leadership, sophisticated products and regulations that protect the security interests of organizations and its people. This panel will highlight the challenges in building comprehensive AI-driven systems, the need for evolved talent and how buy-in from C-Suite is critical in this transformation journey.
Bring in the fun and fervor with the Design Thinking Workshop, where CIOs will brainstorm and present their best creative solutions for a challenge that simulates the real-world effects of Data Privacy and DPDP Act in India.
A moment as we thank our many esteemed partners for their vision, collaboration and timeless support in bringing to life the 20th edition of CIO100 Symposium and Awards.