2026-06-02 –, Room 1
Whether you are standing before a pristine, untouched Cloud Kingdom or inherited a crumbling fortress held together by "Native Tooling" duct tape and hope, the quest remains the same: How do you defend the realm without hiring an army you can’t afford?
In this 40-minute campaign, we aren’t just looking at the map, we’re looking at the scars. Building a cloud security program from scratch is one thing; evolving an established one while the dragons are already circling is another. Drawing from real-world lessons learned in the DevOps trenches, this session explores the "Day 0" decisions and the "Year 2" regrets of choosing between Native Security Tooling and a unified CNAPP.
We’ll sit around the tavern table to discuss the hard-won truths of cloud defense:
- The "Free" Sword’s Hidden Cost: Real-life tales of how "built-in" tools led to siloed alerts, requiring a 20-person "manual correlation guild" just to find a single critical risk.
- Re-Forging the Armor: For those with established programs—how to transition from a "Franken-stack" of point tools to a unified platform without breaking the kingdom’s production.
- The "Agentless" Treaty: Lessons learned from the "Agent Wars." How moving to agentless visibility (the Rogue's Cloak) saved our DevOps relationships and gave us 100% visibility in hours, not months.
- The Multi-Cloud Map: Navigating the treacherous terrain of AWS, Azure, and beyond without losing your mind or your budget to "Console Swapping" fatigue.
Whether you are a Solo Adventurer starting a new program or a War-Weary Veteran trying to consolidate a sprawling one, you’ll leave with a battle-tested blueprint for a security program that scales with your magic, not your headcount, HUZZAH!
Steve leads cloud security at Zelis Healthcare. He started his career through the trial by fire that is MSP life. He pivoted to securing everything from waste facilities and transportation infrastructure to huge financial services organizations, and even mixed in some industry analysis in for good measure. He’s passionate about coming up with security solutions that make colleagues happy and bad actors sad.
He helps security leaders and practitioners fully understand their existing security investments, what gaps they may have, and how they can build a path to realizing Zero Trust within their organizations.