Programme

Chair of the Conference Amardeep warmly welcomes you to the plenary hall during Identity & Access Management 2026 and will walk you through today’s agenda.

In the NFL, preparation, teamwork and split-second decision-making are critical, both on and off the field. The same applies to cybersecurity, where resilience depends on strong leadership, clear playbooks and the ability to respond under pressure. In this session, Kam shares practical insights on building a resilient security organisation, preparing for cyber incidents and protecting critical digital ecosystems where trust, availability and reputation are always on the line. Attendees will gain a leadership-focused perspective on how to turn cyber resilience into a strategic capability.

AI agents are moving from answering questions to taking actions across enterprise systems, creating new IAM questions: who is acting, on whose behalf, what can it do, and when should a human approve? This practical session introduces a runtime identity model for agentic AI, covering distinct agent identity, explicit delegation, least-privilege and contextual authorisation, human oversight and auditability. Through realistic enterprise scenarios and reference architecture patterns, attendees will explore how the same agent can be allowed to perform a routine task, denied access beyond its authority and challenged before a sensitive action. The session concludes with a practical checklist for assessing whether an organisation’s IAM architecture is ready for agentic AI. It is designed as an educational, discussion-led session using scenarios and architecture patterns to make the concepts concrete.

Like the old parable where six blind men each touch a different part of an elephant, a trunk, an ear, a leg, and swear that's the whole animal, your IAM, PAM, cloud and AI security teams are each seeing one piece of the risk and calling it the full picture. Learn why identity doesn't create the problem, privilege does, and why that distinction matters. Understand the four questions to ask to uncover hidden and over privileged identities across your estate. Gain a practical starting point across teams, terminology and technology for closing the gap and unify silos so you can finally see the whole elephant.

AI is changing the way organisations think about identity, access and control. In this session, Hargreaves Lansdown explores the key challenges around agentic AI, employee use of AI tools and the governance of new digital identities. The session also highlights where AI can create value within IAM, IGA and PAM, with practical examples of how existing frameworks and technology can help reduce risk and strengthen identity programmes.

As organisations modernise their digital infrastructure, legacy IAM environments can quickly become a barrier to scalability, security and innovation. In this session, Vodafone IoT shares practical insights from the journey towards cloud-based IAM. The session explores how to manage complexity, reduce risk and ensure continuity while moving identity and access management to the cloud. Attendees will gain a practical view on the challenges, lessons learned and key considerations for building a more scalable and future-ready IAM environment.

AI agents haven't created the non-human identity problem, they've exposed it. Most organisations can't say how many non-human identities they have, who owns them, or what would break if they were revoked. While human identities follow a clear joiner-mover-leaver process, service accounts, API keys and AI agents often exist without clear ownership or governance. This session explores why non-human identities should be governed just like their human counterparts: with clear ownership, least privilege, attributable actions and visibility into every autonomous process. It also examines why the human identity model doesn't always transfer, and how organisations can close the gap without a dedicated IAM function or a large tooling budget.

Identity is often a critical layer of cyber incidents, yet many organisations still struggle to understand how compromised identities, privileges, access pathways and identity infrastructure influence the scope, investigation and response to an attack. This session explores the identity dimension of cyber defence and what happens when compromised accounts, privileged access and identity infrastructure become part of an active security incident. We will look at the role IAM teams play across containment, coordination with Security Operations, remediation and access recovery, as well as some of the operational gaps that can slow an effective response. The session will be practical and interactive, giving attendees a framework and questions they can take back to their own organisations to assess how prepared their IAM function is for the day identity becomes part of the incident.