2024 Tech Summit

The AFCEA Washington DC Cybersecurity Technology Summit is a gathering for executives from government, military, and defense industries to discuss the intensifying competition between world powers. This year's Summit will cover a range of exciting topics, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, cloud services, supply chain security, and Zero Trust architectures to name a few. 2024 is emerging as a pivotal year for the future of AI, as governments, researchers, and enterprises seek to establish how this evolutionary leap in technology can be most practically integrated into our everyday lives.

With cyber threats on the rise, adversaries are targeting the US through influence operations, data breaches, and attempts to infiltrate government networks and weapon systems. Incidents such as the SolarWinds cyberattack and the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline negatively impact the country's economic security and demonstrate potential threats to national security.

The Department of Defense continues migrating operations into cloud environments and diversifying communications pathways to support tactical and strategic operations around the globe. To combat evolving sophisticated cyber threats and to enable broader mission success in an era of great power competition, our military and defense agencies will need to shift from perimeter defenses to Zero-Trust based security controls and technologies. The summit, scheduled for October 24, 2024, aims to shape strategies to fortify cybersecurity in an era of geopolitical complexities.

The key objectives of the summit are to:

• Foster collaboration: Encourage collaboration between government, military, academia, and defense industry leaders to counteract cyber threats within the dynamics of great power competition.
• Analyze the threat landscape: Provide a comprehensive overview of the current cybersecurity threat landscape, focusing on emerging threats and evolving attack vectors.
• Showcase innovative technologies: Highlight technologies and solutions that can provide a strategic advantage in the cyber domain and align with the imperatives of great power competition.

At the Cybersecurity Technology Summit, attendees will dive deeper into the challenges that the DoD must overcome and the people, processes, and technology that must be in place to truly compete, deter, defend, and fight in cyberspace.