CTO Circle - Cybersecurity across the value chain
🔵 Digital Innovation · 🪑 Roundtable · 🔒 Exclusive
Cybersecurity Across the Value Chain
In our first CTO Circles, we explored how much security is enough and how a risk-based approach can help decide where to focus. We then looked at how to build more scalable, robust and secure technology without losing speed.
One question kept coming back: what happens beyond your own organization?
Your security increasingly depends on suppliers, infrastructure, cloud providers, components, open source, APIs and partners; but also on your customers, their environments and the way they use your technology.
For this third CTO Circle, we’ll extend the same risk-based thinking across the entire value chain:
How do you secure an ecosystem you don't fully control?
Starting from a real-world case, we’ll tackle four practical questions:
1. What really needs to be secured across your value chain?
Start again from the risk and vulnerability matrix: which suppliers, technologies, data flows and customer environments can materially affect your business? What is really critical; and how far should you go?
2. Build, buy or depend: where should you keep control?
Once you know what is critical, what should you build yourself and what can you safely buy or outsource? When does buying reduce risk, and when does it create a strategic dependency? Where do cost, expertise and sovereignty change the equation?
3. How much trust is enough, upstream and downstream?
On the supplier side: what should you require, verify or test? What does certification actually guarantee; and where are its limits?
On the customer side: how should their use case, environment, maturity and data sensitivity influence your own security choices? How much of your security strategy should be driven by what your customers actually need?
4. How future-proof are your technology choices?
Your value chain relies on technologies and standards you rarely control entirely. As these evolve, how do you avoid lock-in, incompatibilities or costly changes; and what should you anticipate today?
The objective is not to build another supply-chain checklist. It is to exchange real practices and extend a risk-based approach beyond the boundaries of the company: understand what really matters, decide where control is necessary, determine what level of trust is acceptable, and align internal security choices with customer needs.
A research perspective on evolving cryptography standards
Olivier Pereira, Professor of cryptography at UCLouvain, will join us as a scientific sparring partner and bring a research perspective on the evolution and adoption of cryptographic standards: Why do we create new cryptographic standards? How do we build trust around these key elements of the supply chain? Why should a CTO care, and how to make choices?
Who is this for?
→ CTOs and Senior Technology Leaders
→ From companies active in the digital sector
→ 15 participants maximum
A confidential setting where participants can share not only what works, but also the vulnerabilities, uncertainties and decisions they are still working through.
Participation is subject to approval to keep the group relevant and allow for meaningful peer-to-peer exchanges.
This event is organized with the support of Wallonie Entreprendre, in accordance with the de minimis Regulation.