Virtual Roundtable
Building Trusted Foundations for AI: Security, Governance, and Resilience Across Hybrid Cloud
September 23, 2026 | 1:00 pm ET / 10:00 am PT
Organizations are under increasing pressure to accelerate AI adoption while maintaining security, compliance, and operational resilience.
As AI agents, cloud-native applications, APIs, and automated workflows proliferate, traditional approaches to identity, secrets management, and governance are struggling to keep pace.
Join IDC and IBM for an interactive executive roundtable examining how leading organizations are building trusted foundations for AI and hybrid cloud environments. This discussion will explore emerging challenges around machine identities, secrets and certificate management, AI governance, regulatory compliance, and cyber resilience. Attendees will exchange insights on balancing innovation with risk management, securing distributed workloads across on-premises and cloud environments, and establishing consistent security policies that scale with business demands.
What Attendees Will Learn
- Strategies for improving cyber resilience, compliance, and operational agility while enabling faster innovation
- How leading organizations are securing AI workloads, machine identities, and automated workflows at scale
- Best practices for managing secrets, credentials, and governance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
Discussion Themes
Five Conversations Every Senior IT Leader Should Be Having Right Now
Trusted AI Requires a Trusted Infrastructure
- Foundational security controls needed to scale AI responsibly.
- Balancing innovation, governance, and risk management.
- How enterprise security practices have evolved over the last two years.
The Rise of Machine Identities
- Managing the growth of AI agents, APIs, containers, and non-human identities.
- Securing secrets, credentials, certificates, and cryptographic assets.
- Governance considerations for AI workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
Securing Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments
- Consistent security policies across on-premises, Azure, and other cloud environments.
- Visibility, control, and risk management across distributed infrastructures.
- Best practices for securing workloads while maintaining flexibility and scale.
Data Protection and Compliance
- Emerging regulatory and compliance requirements.
- Protecting sensitive data used by AI and cloud applications.
- Industry standards and protocols supporting trusted AI adoption.
Operational Resilience and Cyber Readiness
- Reducing risk while maintaining business agility.
- Preparing for increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
- Building resilience into AI, cloud, and automation strategies.
What To Expect
A live video meeting led by a skilled host/moderator
An intimate gathering of senior leaders from diverse industries, grappling with similar issues
A secure, private conversation open only to a carefully vetted group (no recording, no playback)
Your host
Blair Newman
Field CTO
IBM
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Blair Newman
At the intersection of Edge AI, multi-cloud strategy, and enterprise execution, Blair Newman helps global enterprises unlock intelligence where it matters most, at the edge, across infrastructure, and inside decision workflows. Blair is a globally recognized technology executive, trusted by Fortune 100 CIOs and CTOs to translate complex architectures into business-aligned outcomes.
He advises organizations on activating distributed intelligence, designing trust-centric control planes, and scaling AI-native operating models that deliver measurable value across industries. He is the founding force behind Neuton.AI, a patented Edge AI platform purpose-built to deliver intelligence where decisions are made, at the edge of infrastructure, inside workflows, and across highly regulated sectors. The platform’s success led to its acquisition by Nordic Semiconductor.
Earlier in his career, Blair led multi-cloud modernization, infrastructure portfolio rationalization, and post-merger integration efforts for global organizations, scaling global delivery operations across the Americas and EMEA. He is a frequent speaker on Edge AI, distributed trust architectures, and AI-native enterprise operating models.
Shane Schick
Emcee & Host
Contributing Editor
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Shane Schick
Shane Schick has been telling the story of IT innovation as it happens for more than 20 years. He has been a tech columnist for Yahoo Finance and the Globe and Mail, an editor of multiple CIO-level publications and has led conferences educating IT leaders, marketers, and more. Shane currently writes and edits 360 Magazine, which is focused on driving excellence in customer experience (CX) design.
Partner
Sponsored By
IBM + Microsoft
IBM and Microsoft partner to help organizations turn innovation into business value. By combining Microsoft’s cloud, AI, and productivity platforms with IBM’s expertise in automation, security, data, hybrid cloud, and consulting, we help clients build, connect, govern, and scale solutions that accelerate enterprise transformation.