George Washington University (GWU)

Federal agencies face the dual mandate of modernizing identity infrastructure and maintaining operational continuity across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. For IT and security leaders in both DoD and civilian agencies, the question isn’t just how to deploy, but how to unify identity and access across diverse systems, users, and missions.

The purpose of identity-first modernization is to:

• Enable agencies to securely deploy anywhere, from FedRAMP to their own virtual private clouds (VPCs), on-prem to denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited-bandwidth (DDIL) environments
• Onboard any user or application
• Unify access management across fragmented environments

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how to centralize authentication through macro-deployments and meet zero trust goals with micro-deployments using the same core identity platform
• Outline how to use hybrid identity deployments for IT environments that can’t go all-in on cloud
• Delineate steps to user and app onboarding at scale across cloud, on-prem and siloed systems
• Evaluate steps to enabling compliant and auditable access

The Genesis Mission reframes data, computing<, and AI as national infrastructure for science, energy, and security. For DOE, NNSA, and the National Laboratories, the challenge is no longer experimentation, it is operationalization: how to evolve federated, security-constrained research environments into AI-ready, auditable, and continuously governed platforms without disrupting mission science.

The discussion between government and industry moves beyond cloud migration narratives to focus on data-centric security, provenance-by-default pipelines, HPC-AI convergence, and lifecycle governance across classified and unclassified domains.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify architectural patterns for data and AI platforms
• Review governance models that scale across federated laboratories
• Evaluate practical strategies for technical debt extraction, not just modernization
• Examine AI/ML enablement approaches grounded in data provenance and trust
• Delineate security models that enable multi-lab collaboration by design
• Define metrics that measure scientific velocity, reuse, and mission impact

The federal government continues to invest in the development of quantum computing, but agencies are recognizing that it poses a threat to current encryption approaches. The Government Accountability Office summed it up. 

“Unlike computers we use today, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break cryptography in just a few hours or days compared to the billions of years a conventional computer would take. Public-key cryptography, a common type of cryptography used by federal agencies and critical infrastructure, is specifically at risk.”

Quantum computers powerful enough to break today’s encryption don’t exist yet. But attackers aren’t waiting. They’re already collecting sensitive data in what’s known as harvest-now-decrypt-later (HNDL) attacks.

Transitioning from current cryptographic systems to post-quantum security involves understanding where cryptography is used, assessing which data and systems are most at risk, and planning migration to quantum-resistant algorithms. Achieving quantum readiness requires coordinated action across governance, risk management, technology, and vendor ecosystems to ensure encryption can be replaced safely and on time. 

Learning Objectives:

• Identify the five pillars of quantum readiness
• Build a roadmap for achieving quantum readiness
• Establish metrics to track progress toward establishing quantum-resistant encryption
• Incorporate quantum readiness into resiliency projects and programs

In January the U.S. Army conducted Dynamic Front 26, a multinational training exercise designed to rehearse NATO regional plans and enhance the integration of multi-domain fires across a distributed battlefield. One conclusion? That soldiers are drowning in so much battlefield data that AI is needed to make sense of it all.

The problem of too much data, coming in too fast from multiple sensors and networked weapons, is one the military and intelligence communities are wrestling with. Defense contractors face a similar challenge – how to incorporate the tools that can help manage the data flow and facilitate decision-making in combat scenarios. The difficulty is heightened by the prospect of edge devices operating, while disconnected or otherwise offline, in a hostile environment.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the circumstances that create the need for air-gapped or disconnected devices in a contested space
• Review the nature and volume of data flows that warfighters receive and the decisions they look to make
• Delineate the roles of governance and security in ensuring both operational security and protection of the military’s most important asset – information
• Identify the core elements of an AI application that allows for scalability and repeatability

Canadian government and public sector organizations are rapidly adopting AI, cloud services, and digital citizen platforms while facing increasingly sophisticated and fast-moving threats. 

Traditional, static segmentation approaches often struggle to keep pace with evolving hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Static segmentation is not as agile as an AI-enabled tool. 

Learning Objectives:

• Learn where automation and AI can strengthen security operations—and where human oversight remains essential
• Understand how modern segmentation helps reduce breach impact while supporting service continuity and compliance requirements
• Evaluate why visibility and context are critical for protecting sensitive government systems, citizen data, and critical infrastructure

Across state and local government, the pressure to improve service delivery and customer experience is real. Residents expect digital services that are as simple and secure as the private sector. At the same time, many agencies are still constrained by legacy systems, siloed data, limited staff capacity and long‑standing accessibility and equity gaps.

Join us to hear state and local government leaders and industry experts discuss practical ways to improve customer experience and how to build trust with the people they serve through modernized services.

Through three focused panel sessions, we’ll explore how to:

• Modernize technical foundations without disrupting critical services
• Design more human‑centered, accessible, and inclusive experiences
• Use data, AI, and new delivery models to scale CX improvements over time

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the relationship among the components that comprise today’s modern IT foundation and how they improve cybersecurity
• Outline the steps to improve both the user experience and the customer experience by inserting AI and automation
• Delineate appropriate metrics to measure improvements in meeting your agency’s mission, including tracking customer experiences
• You’ll leave with practical steps to make your services clearer, more inclusive, and more personalized, while building resident trust and confidence in your agency

Cybersecurity is always a volatile topic – new threats, new approaches to defense, emerging new attack surfaces. The emergence of AI as a commercially viable technology introduces new considerations, including growing recognition that it substantially increases the need for risk management. 

Join us as thought leaders from government and industry discuss what is happening now, and what threats and opportunities may arise from current trends. 

Learning Objectives:

• Identify where new AI tools can reinforce existing cyber defenses
• Examine how to protect data privacy within an AI-enabled system
• Evaluate your software supply chain to determine how and where to implement zero trust requirements
• Delineate the elements of a universally applied ZT architecture, including identities, accounts, assets, resources, authentication, behavior, and data
• Review your agency’s operations to locate where OT is used and conduct risk assessments to determine corrective measures

The challenges and issues facing state agencies regarding IT investments and modernization are very similar to those federal agencies are dealing with, but often are compounded because state responsibilities (licensing, inspection, and citizen assistance, to name a few) are that much closer to the customers who need their services.

This three-day event tracks many of the priorities that state CIOs are paying attention to –cybersecurity, resilience, modernization, cloud computing, data management, using AI, and analytics, to name a few.

Learning Objectives:

• Establish a working definition of resilience for your organization
• Understand the complementary roles of cybersecurity and resilience in keeping agency systems operational in the event of a cyber attack
• Evaluate ways to use SIEM and SOAR to strengthen your SOC’s performance
• Outline how using modernization toolkits can speed the delivery of better services to citizens
• Identify the forms of hybrid cloud (such as public bolstered by private cloud) that best suit your agency’s requirements
• Understand the integration of SaaS platforms into your agency’s cloud choices
• Understand how to use data platforms to create governance policies that provide quality data
• Evaluate the use of analytics to drive budgeting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
• Delineate ways that GenAI tools can be used for better forecasting and making data-driven decisions

Cybersecurity consistently ranks as state CIOs’ top priority in IT. But resilience – the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyberattacks and disruptions, ensuring critical services continue despite adversity, and moving beyond prevention to focus on rapid response and continuity of operations when breaches inevitably occur – has not received the same kind of attention. 

A report in November 2024 focusing on states’ efforts on resilience found that 69% of respondents in the state/local/education (SLED) sector acknowledged that cyber resilience is not a whole-organization priority and a majority of IT governance teams didn’t understand what cyber resilience is. 

Learning Objectives:

• Establish a working definition of resilience for your organization
• Understand the complementary roles of cybersecurity and resilience in keeping agency systems operational in the event of a cyber attack
• Evaluate ways to use SIEM and SOAR to strengthen your SOC’s performance

The National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) reported in its 2025 State CIO Survey that many states have been providing supplemental funding to their CIO organizations to use on IT modernization and/or innovation. Whether streamlining state DMVs or setting up digital services for courts, agencies are focusing on providing better, more streamlined services to their customers. 

Included in these modernization efforts is the continuing embrace of the cloud. All the respondents to the NASCIO survey said they have a multi-cloud strategy; their reasons were many and varied, such as modernizing their applications, optimizing their budgets, and aging (legacy) hardware. CIOs in states with federated governance structures discussed selecting software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, with the potential to build on their state’s cloud portfolio. 

Learning Objectives:

• Outline how using modernization toolkits can speed the delivery of better services to citizens
• Identify the forms of hybrid cloud (such as public bolstered by private cloud) that best suit your agency’s requirements
• Understand the integration of SaaS platforms into your agency’s cloud choices

State and local governments are concentrating on improving internal operations in order to deliver services more efficiently and cost-effectively. In plain terms, agencies want to simplify the work employees do and the steps constituents must take to receive services.

State-level CIOs are looking to reduce operational friction, leverage technology to automate processes, and streamline bureaucracy for both employees and the public. For instance, agencies are automating repetitive, rules-based tasks, such as digitizing frequently used documents to send and receive; defining principles that minimize the need for citizens to submit the same information multiple times to different agencies; and asking employees for suggestions to remove bottlenecks in their processes. 

Learning Objectives:

• Understand your agency’s workflow and where bottlenecks, duplication, and repetitive tasks slow down performance
• Evaluate the customer experience and how to align digital services with their needs, such as consolidating agency-wide digital phone, and in-person experiences to reduce friction
• Delineate metrics that can track performance improvements and employees’ job satisfaction 

Join us as thought leaders from government and industry share their expertise, their experiences, and their suggestions for harnessing the power of AI to provide noticeable improvements to internal operations while improving security and opening up opportunities for new and expanded services to their constituencies. 

Agencies throughout state, local, territorial, and tribal governments are being encouraged to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their everyday operations, to streamline processes, modernize outdated systems, and strengthen cybersecurity defenses. Using AI is viewed as one promising way to deal with shrinking budgets and increased demand for services by citizens. 

This three-day event addresses key issues that agencies must contend with in ensuring that investment in AI generates maximum benefit. 

Learning Objectives:

• Outline the capabilities of AI management and compliance platforms and match them to the needs of your agency
• Delineate the use of the platforms to maintain auditability and traceability
• Understand how these platforms can guard against “shadow AI,” unauthorized use of AI within the agency
• Identify available AI tools to determine which best fit the security needs of your agency
• Review ways to integrate AI cybersecurity into existing defenses
• Understand the nature and magnitude of the threats posed by AI-empowered attacks
• Delineate places in your agency’s IT systems where AI can serve as a bridge between legacy systems and new services for citizens
• Establish priorities for tasks and processes that can be streamlined through the use of AI tools
• Outline metrics that can measure improvements, such as improved accuracy in testing, cost savings through reductions in outside labor costs (such as coding), and faster turnaround time in updating apps

State and local agencies are exploring how to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations – as long as they observe their own state-level and any applicable federal-level regulations.

To meet these requirements, AI governance and compliance platforms help organizations manage, monitor, and enforce policies for safe, ethical, and legal use of AI, covering the entire lifecycle from development to deployment, by automating risk assessment, bias detection, and access control. These platforms centralize control, provide transparency, track data lineage, and automate auditing to build trust and prevent issues like unfair outcomes or data breaches.

Learning Objectives:

• Outline the capabilities of AI management and compliance platforms and match them to the needs of your agency
• Delineate the use of the platforms to maintain auditability and traceability
• Understand how these platforms can guard against “shadow AI,” unauthorized use of AI within the agency

It is widely recognized that the introduction of AI tools is a two-edged sword when it comes to cybersecurity. Attackers, whether profit-driven hackers or hostile nation-states, are using AI to launch faster, wider-spread and more sophisticated attacks, including AI-generated phishing and spear phishing emails, malware capable of adapting to changes in defensive responses, and deepfakes that are very hard to detect.

State and local agencies are attractive targets, since there are many more of them and often do not have the financial or IT resources of federal agencies. 

This makes state and local agencies’ use of AI in cyber defense critical – AI tools can operate at machine speed and scale and adapt in response to evolving threats. These tools can significantly improve threat detection and intelligence by identifying anomalies and patterns signaling attacks under way; automating incident responses such as isolating compromised devices and resetting credentials; using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to flag sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks; and prioritizing vulnerabilities to emphasize the most critical risks. 

Learning Objectives:

• Identify available AI tools to determine which best fit the security needs of your agency
• Review ways to integrate AI cybersecurity into existing defenses
• Understand the nature and magnitude of the threats posed by AI-empowered attacks

At its annual conference in October 2025, the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) focused on “measurable modernization” facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI). Intelligent, AI-powered tools can streamline IT, converting slow, manual legacy system upgrades into faster, cheaper, and more secure processes by automating code analysis, testing, data migration, and even generating code, ultimately making systems more efficient, scalable, and future-proof while freeing humans for higher-value tasks. 

There are several ways AI is suited to improve operations. To name just a few:

• By analyzing legacy code, such as COBOL, to understand its structure, find inefficiencies and even rewrite it into modern coding languages, AI reduces legacy debt and eases manpower needs for obsolete coding skills.
• AI tools can automate testing and quality controls, significantly speeding up quality assurance and moving apps to more easily supported operations.
• Using AI can generate predictive maintenance, identifying potential system failures and enabling self-healing capabilities.

Learning Objectives:

• Delineate places in your agency’s IT systems where AI can serve as a bridge between legacy systems and new services for citizens
• Establish priorities for tasks and processes that can be streamlined through the use of AI tools
• Outline metrics that can measure improvements, such as improved accuracy in testing, cost savings through reductions in outside labor costs (such as coding), and faster turnaround time in updating apps