Forrester’s Security & Risk Forum is just days away, and I am really looking forward to it. The theme for this year’s event is “Grow Trust. Drive Business.” We chose this theme for good reason — we believe companies that earn and retain trust among customers, employees, and partners drive revenue-generating loyalty behaviors like retention and advocacy. This means there’s a real and increasingly critical opportunity for companies to go to market on trust — and that starts with the security leader.

Security leaders, their strategies, and their teams provide the springboard from which firms go to market on trust. Security programs that empower firms to go to market on trust are built not only to deliver the competence needed to protect customers and IP but do so with integrity and empathy that extends the influence of security well beyond technology and into the very fabric of the company.

When CISOs and their organizations achieve this triad of competence, integrity, and empathy as detailed in our report Deliver The Foundation Of The Trusted Business, it changes the role of security from being a necessary but cumbersome fact of life to the foundation and beating heart of customer trust — and something that the company can bring to market as a differentiator.

My S&R Forum keynote panel discussion brings together two CISOs with two interesting and distinct stories to tell about empowering their business to lead with trust. These are:

  • Jason Lee, CISO at Zoom. Jason is joining us to shed some light on the steps he took as CISO to earn back customer trust after a tumultuous period of security and privacy issues for the now ubiquitous communication platform — and what Zoom is doing to ensure that customer trust is front and center in all it does moving forward. I can’t wait to hear this comeback story!
  • Puneet Thapliyal, CISO at Ginger, a Headspace Health company. Trust is literally the lifeblood of Ginger’s business. Puneet had his own work to do with Ginger customers and clinicians as a result of Zoom’s issues in 2020. He plans to give us the details on what he did to assure them of their privacy. He’ll also discuss what it takes to build a company from the ground up with security and privacy baked in, given the highly sensitive nature of the data Ginger must guard.

I have lots of questions for both Jason and Puneet on how they arm everyone in the organization — from customer-facing roles in sales and customer success to developers to executives — with the tools to make security the easy choice in their daily lives and to act as security champions within their teams and customers. And you’ll get to ask questions of these leaders in the interactive chat. Block your calendars for Wednesday, November 10 at 12:35 p.m. ET and join us!

In addition, we’ve got a whole track dedicated to security leadership and three others on product and application security; Zero Trust; and risk, privacy, and compliance management. Plus, we’ve got keynotes from Forrester heavy-hitters Steph Balaouras, Jeff Pollard, Renee Murphy, Enza Iannopollo, and Allie Mellen and built-in time for drop-in peer networking on a variety of subjects (something near and dear to my heart) … did I mention I’m really looking forward to this event? See you next week!