Europe is at a strategic inflection point. According to IDC’s latest research, security spending in Europe is forecast to reach nearly $60 billion by 2028, growing at a compound annual growth rate of around 9.4% from 2025 to 2029. Organizations are responding to intensifying cyber threats, expanding regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, NIS2, GDPR, and DORA, and a surge in stakeholder demand for digital trust and sovereignty. IDC also reports that software and cloud-native security solutions are expected to account for a majority of global security spend by 2028, as enterprises accelerate their adoption of integrated, analytics-driven protection.

At the same time, AI is reshaping the security landscape in Europe. IDC research shows that 38% of European organizations are already investing in AI or Agentic AI, and 43% are actively testing or running proofs of concept, while nearly 70% expect AI-driven disruption within the next 18 months. For European security leaders, this represents both a strategic opportunity and a growing area of risk. AI is enhancing threat detection, automation, and decision-making, yet it is also being exploited by adversaries to scale attacks and manipulate data. As a result, European organizations are prioritizing investments in AI-powered security analytics, identity and access management (IAM), and managed detection and response (MDR) to stay ahead of threats while maintaining transparency, compliance, and ethical governance.

Most organisations haven’t failed at Zero Trust because they chose the wrong technology. They’ve struggled because they’re trying to bolt Zero Trust onto architectures that were never designed for it.

At the same time, AI is changing the pace of cybersecurity. Vulnerabilities are discovered faster, exploits are developed faster, and attackers are moving faster than ever before. Complexity has become one of the biggest risks facing security teams.

In this session, Jaye Tillson explains why Zero Trust is an operating model rather than a product, why consistency is the foundation of modern security, and how organisations can simplify their architecture by bringing identity, networking and security together.

You’ll leave with practical ideas for reducing complexity, improving resilience and building a Zero Trust strategy that’s designed for the realities of today’s hybrid and AI-driven world.

AI assistants are moving beyond answering questions and recommendations to acting: accessing data, invoking APIs, orchestrating workflows, and transacting on behalf of people. This creates significant opportunities for better customer experiences, but also new risks around impersonation, excessive permissions, and accountability.

In this session, Andrei will explore how organisations can build trust into conversational and agentic experiences by giving AI agents their own identities, binding them to an accountable human or organisation, applying delegated and least-privilege access, authorising actions at runtime, and keeping people in control of high-impact decisions. The session will show why identity is becoming the control plane for secure AI adoption and the next generation of customer experiences.

To defeat the adversary, we must move beyond tracking their tools—we must understand their mind.

The traditional approach to cybersecurity has focused relentlessly on the technical what (malware signatures, TTPs) and the macro why (geopolitical tension, economic drivers). However, the next decisive frontier in intelligence and defence requires a pivot to the who: the personality dynamics that fuel cyber threat actor groups and using autonomous tools to follow in their footsteps.

As organizations balance economic pressures, AI initiatives, and cybersecurity priorities, backup modernization is often pushed down the investment list. Yet the financial and operational impact of a successful ransomware attack can far exceed the cost of building resilient recovery infrastructure. Join Veeam and Object First as they explore IDC research on the growing risks of deferred backup investment and share practical recommendations for strengthening cyber resilience.

Every cybersecurity strategy is built around a single moment: the day after an attack.

When systems are encrypted, identities are compromised, and business services are offline, prevention is no longer the priority. Recovery is.

This session reveals why organisations are shifting investment and leadership focus towards Cyber Resilience and Resilience Operations (ResOps).

Jake lifts the lid on the darker side of artificial intelligence, taking you deep into the criminal underworld powered by today’s most advanced technology. In the name of research, he used AI driven face-swapping tools to pass a live video job online interview under a completely false identity. Not once, but repeatedly. Through these real-world experiments, Jake reveals how powerful AI tools are already being weaponised by criminals to infiltrate organisations from the inside, bypassing traditional security and exploiting human trust.

But it doesn’t stop there. With the same tools now widely available, Jake demonstrates how AI can clone voices, generate convincing documents and create fake identities in seconds, giving cybercriminals everything they need to scale deception like never before. Nothing is real anymore. The question is, would you spot it?

The networking area remains open for final conversations