CSO Pakistan x CXO Masters Academy, the leadership and intelligence arm of CXO Media, has successfully concluded a landmark two-city series of Executive Roundtables. The series, presented by Commtel, brought together the nation’s top cybersecurity leadership to map strategic resilience for the coming fiscal year. This dual-city approach was carefully planned to first capture deep strategic insights from the C-Suite and then expand that vital conversation to engage senior security practitioners and their management teams, maximizing the knowledge transfer across Pakistan’s security ecosystem.
Islamabad: A C-Suite Convergence and Strategic Consensus
The Islamabad session, themed “Trends for InfoSec: Building Robust Modern Enterprises,” proved to be both engaging and powerful, convening CISOs and technology heads from institutions like Abhi Bank, Askari Bank, Jazz, NADRA, NTC, Telenor Microfinance Bank, and UBL. The core discussions, driven by veterans such as Amir Siddiqui (CISO, Abhi Bank) and Jawad Khalid Mirza (CISO, Askari Bank), solidified a C-Suite consensus: the shift to a Zero-Trust architecture must become the foundational principle for all new deployments and a prioritized roadmap for legacy modernization, moving security controls to identity and access management. Crucially, leaders reframed security not as a cost center, but as a business enabler, agreeing that all FY26 security budgets must demonstrate ROI by directly enabling new revenue streams or market expansion, supported by an agile risk management framework. Furthermore, the imperative to adopt AI-powered Extended Detection and Response (XDR) systems was highlighted as essential to augment human analysts, combat increasingly sophisticated attacks, and move operations toward proactive threat management.
Lahore: Deep Dive and Capacity Building
The conversation expanded significantly in Lahore, engaging a broader group of over 40 senior security professionals and their teams from organizations including Allied Bank, Bank of Punjab, MCB Bank, SNGPL, and others. The evening featured a powerful panel and roundtable session focused on “Leading A Resilient Security Strategy in the Digital Enterprise.” The Lahore Panel, including experts like Asif Iqbal (CISO, MCB Islamic Bank), Muhammad Ali Manzer (CISO, Bank of Punjab), and Awais Ejaz (CTO, UBL), provided diverse and actionable perspectives on fortifying security operations against escalating threats and complex compliance challenges. Participants collectively gained insights designed to strengthen their defenses and foster essential peer-to-peer relationships across diverse industry groups, successfully building on the strategic foundation set in the capital.
Insights for a Digitally Defended Future
This event series marks a major milestone for CSO Pakistan x CXO Masters Academy as it focuses on gathering high-impact market intelligence to support the technology community. As Aqsa Tariq, Editor-in-Chief of CXO Media, highlighted in her opening remarks, “These roundtables are crucial because they allow us to leverage our platform to pool the collective wisdom of this community, developing actionable intelligence that helps every organization in Pakistan build a more digitally defended future.” The overwhelming response confirms the acute need for these focused, high-quality dialogues to tackle the contemporary challenge of securing modern enterprises.
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