We received great feedback and requests for more from the Birds of a Feather meetups at S4x25. We heard you and here’s the plan for S4x26.

  • There will be Birds of a Feather formal meetups: Manufacturing, Electric, and Oil & Gas
  • The meetups will be 2.5 hours long.
  • The first 30-minutes and last 45-minutes are for networking
  • The middle 75 minutes will include a 15-minute mini-keynote and then a moderated discussion around a set of topics. The moderator will introduce topics, ask questions, solicit opinions, and pass the microphone around to get a large number of participants involved. (Note: we did this to great effect at S4 when there were less than 100 attendees.

The topics for the moderated discussion are starting points, and if you have a suggestion for an alternate or additional topic email us at info@s4xevents.com.

We also can make the Birds of a Feather room available to other sectors for an informal session if there is someone or a group willing to take the lead.

Manufacturing: Tuesday 1:00 – 3:30

Mini Fireside Chat: Dale Peterson Interview Aron Semle

Discussion Moderator: Dale Peterson

Current Topics (subject to change)

  • How best to address the business requirements for more “in depth” integrations with ERP / Quality / Telemetry / and other business systems? Is a co-mingling of technologies pushing the boundaries of current OT Cybersecurity Practices.
  • Does using Purdue Model levels as a security architecture hurt business value more then the risk it is trying to prevent.
  • Does manufacturing really need IEC 62443 Security Level 4?

Electric: Wednesday 10:30 – 1:00

Mini Keynote and Discussion Moderator: Patrick Miller

Current Topics (subject to change)

  • How to secure a virtual power plant?
  • BCSI in the cloud
  • What does a private-public partnership look like beyond sharing IOCs? What does industry collective defense look like in a persistent landscape? How can asset owners assert more control/command over the areas we influence?

Oil & Gas Sector: Thursday 12:30 – 3:00

Mini Keynote and Discussion Moderator: TBD

Current Topics (subject to change):

  • Incident Response – how much vendor reliance is healthy?
  • OT control-and-command from private cloud and from private 5G/LTE mobile networks.  What restrictions should be followed. and SCADA reliance on Telcoms – is everyone tunneling / encrypting?
  • Integration of identity and data with IT and other systems.