Agenda

Welcome to Xccelerate 2025!

As we navigate a time of transition and complexity, government leaders face unprecedented challenges. Nearly 50% of decision-makers report declining confidence in their ability to lead through uncertainty. The rapid pace of change, evolving technology threats, and operational disruptions can be overwhelming. Now more than ever, public sector leaders must embrace a new approach to ensure mission success.

Renowned entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and innovation expert Josh Linkner introduces Find A Way™️, a proven five-step framework designed to help agencies and organizations cultivate ingenuity at every level. Whether the goal is enhancing resilience, strengthening cybersecurity, improving service delivery, or fostering workforce engagement, this approach provides practical strategies to drive sustainable success in government operations.

The Find A Way™️ framework emphasizes adaptability over rigidity, creativity over routine, and strategic improvisation over static planning. By adopting this model, government leaders can navigate uncertainty with confidence, remain agile in the face of disruption, and achieve their agency’s objectives with clarity and impact—regardless of external challenges.

From people to AI tools, every identity must be managed with precision. This session explores identity security solutions and their role in enforcing Zero Trust principles. Drawing insights from the federal government’s approach to Zero Trust, we’ll highlight how comprehensive identity management is critical to achieve agencies’ goals of securing complex and diverse environments. Learn practical strategies for implementing Zero Trust principles effectively to strengthen access controls and protect federal networks.

With ransomware accounting for nearly one-third of all breaches in 2023, organizations must adopt a holistic approach to resilience. It's no longer enough to focus solely on traditional data protection; mobile endpoints now represent a critical frontier in cybersecurity. This session will explore comprehensive strategies for protecting your organization's data and mobile endpoints, strengthening defenses against ransomware, and enabling fast recovery with minimal disruption to operations. Gain insights into building a proactive, integrated defense posture that keeps your organization resilient in an ever-evolving threat landscape.

As the quantum era approaches, enterprises must navigate dual challenges: mitigating current vulnerabilities and preparing for the shift to quantum-resistant cryptography. A critical aspect of this preparation is achieving comprehensive asset visibility—locating all endpoints, identifying assets across workloads, applications, and multi-cloud environments, and uncovering hidden vulnerabilities. Experts will discuss strategies to build a unified vulnerability management process that not only addresses M23-01 and M23-02 requirements but also ensures cryptographic resilience by replacing weak encryption algorithms. Gain insights into securing enterprise assets, enhancing endpoint discovery, and adopting quantum-safe cryptographic standards.

In an era where cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated, effective cybersecurity demands advanced innovative driven solutions. Join this session to explore how to leverage innovative technologies to deliver efficient vulnerability detection, rapid threat prioritization, and proactive response across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Learn how tools can integrate seamlessly to secure your network from on-prem data centers to the cloud, ensuring visibility, protection, and adaptability in an evolving threat landscape. Discover innovative techniques to detect vulnerabilities, mitigate risks, and simplify multi-cloud security management without overstretching resources.

Thank you for attending Xccelerate 2025!

During this session, learn how identity has become the new security perimeter and how CyberArk meets today's evolving threats with a comprehensive identity security platform to secure human and machine identities. We will discuss practical ways to achieve optimal maturity for the identity pillar of Zero Trust.  

Explore agencies' journey towards Zero Trust maturity, hearing directly from ZT practitioners as they offer valuable insights on their Zero Trust implementations. Hear lessons-learned on overcoming challenges and how they achieve effective Zero Trust security.

As federal agencies advance their Zero Trust strategies, understanding and managing cryptographic assets is essential for securing data and identities. Learn how cryptographic discovery and visibility provide the foundation for Zero Trust Architecture, enabling organizations to identify vulnerabilities, mitigate risks, and ensure compliance with mandates such as M-23-02 and the Cyber EO.

Watch four co-founders and CEOs from early-stage cyber companies pitch their innovations to a Merlin Ventures panel of four CISOs, moderated by Merlin Ventures Managing Partner Seth Spergel. Hear the grilling questions, evaluate the thoughtful responses, and see the genuine reactions. What do you think of these emerging technologies?

This session provides an exclusive opportunity for government CISOs and qualified security executives to get an inside look into very early emerging technologies -- and invites government security executives to join the community.

Safeguarding mission-critical data against cyber threats is a critical component of Data Resilience. During this session, learn how you can centralize security-related activity across your environment, including data backups. Learn how you can empower your teams through Automation+AI to respond more quickly to cyber threats, ensuring that data remains protected and resilient.

Unifying security data enhances threat detection, accelerates incident response, and lowers operational costs by delivering actionable insights. In this session, learn how to improve SOC efficiencies and achieve compliance with mandates such as M-22-09 and M-21-31 through a unified approach of your security data.

As cyber threats increasingly target operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS), agencies need deep visibility and real-time threat detection. In this session, explore how Claroty’s cybersecurity platform delivers these capabilities without disrupting mission-critical operations. Learn how to apply Zero Trust principles to OT networks, and meet mandates such as BOD-23-01 and M-22-09.

We know cyber attacks are more complex than ever. How can federal agencies best safeguard IoT, OT, and mobile environments? Experts will explore best practices for implementing Zero Trust for these environments, beginning with comprehensive asset visibility and protection against a dynamic cyber threat landscape that targets these mission-critical systems.

Protecting critical infrastructure requires a unified approach between government and industry. Join this session for a lively discussion about successful partnerships, policy frameworks, and initiatives that enhance resilience and mitigate risks 

Join us in this interactive Labs demonstration as we walk through a scenario of cryptographic discovery and inventory utilizing existing endpoint management tools to report cryptographic assets and comply with OMB M-23-02, Migrating to Post-Quantum Cryptography. We will demonstrate how the solution can discover unknown and malicious algorithms to protect the environment against threats like ransomware.

Join us in this interactive Labs demonstration where we will showcase various techniques to protect against ransomware throughout the attack chain. We will demonstrate how our solutions can effectively protect endpoints, detect threats and quickly recover data in the event of data loss.

Join us in this interactive Labs demonstration as we dive into a threat hunting scenario using the events, incidents and telemetry data from our previous Labs demonstrations. Using orchestration and automation, we will demonstrate how the security analyst can quickly identity threats, correlate, enrich and automate incident response.