Overview
Save the Date!
ISSA is proud to announce the 3rd Annual Cyber Resilience Awareness Day, hosted by the ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG. This free event provides clear, actionable guidance on what cyber resilience truly means, how organizations can move beyond buzzwords and compliance checklists to embed resilience into systems by design.
The event demystifies cyber resilience by explaining practical frameworks and tools that support real-world implementation. Cyber resilience extends information security and operational resilience, focusing on an organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber-related disruptions. While interest is growing, a shared, practical understanding across the community is still emerging.
This year’s theme, “Quantifying Cyber Resilience Readiness”, centers on how organizations assess their current state, identify gaps, and improve over time. Rather than promoting a single approach, the program explores pragmatic use of established frameworks, metrics, and practitioner-driven tools across people, processes, and technology. Topics include maturity-based recovery assurance, threat informed defense, zero trust, architectural dependencies, decision making under disruption, and demonstrating measurable resilience outcomes.
A core theme is the value of maturity models and common language, with the Cyber Resilience Capability Maturity Model (CR-CMM) used as a reference to help benchmark capabilities, align teams, and communicate progress consistently. The event features expert-led sessions and real-world success stories for practitioners, leaders, and those new to cyber resilience.
Registration page coming this summer.
Moderator
Francesco Chiarini – Chairman ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG, Founder and Lead Instructor Cyber Resilience Academy
Francesco Chiarini is the founder and Chair of the ISSA.org Cyber Resilience Special Interest Group with nearly 2500 associates across the globe, and the creator of the Cyber Resilience Awareness Day worldwide. He is also the founder and lead instructor of the Cyber Resilience Academy, a global pioneer in cyber resilience education that equips professionals with the skills to design and safeguard resilient enterprise environments. Sought-after speaker who presented at global audiences including recent talks at United Nations, MITRE, FS-ISAC, ISACA, ISSA, Microsoft, London Stock Exchange, FIRST, Asia Pacific CERT, Africa CERT and many others.
In 2022, Francesco has co-authored multiple recognized research papers such as the World Economic Forum “The Cyber Resilience Index: Advancing Organizational Cyber Resilience”, the ASIFMA “Data Vaulting considerations for improving data recovery” and the Eurocontrol “Incident Timing Metrics, Reporting Cyber Risk to Boards.
From 2019 when NIST released the 800-160 publication, Francesco specialized in equipping companies with the ability to withstand and recover from multi-faceted attacks from advanced adversaries. He had the privilege to build a best-in-class cyber resilience program vetted -among others- by experts of the US CISA cyber resilience task force. In this capacity, Francesco has coined the concept of “high value target” to identify key assets from an adversarial standpoint.
Francesco currently leads global cyber resilience for a major pharmaceutical organization, where he focuses on assessing and advancing its resilience posture by identifying the core capabilities needed to stay sustainably ahead of evolving cyber threats.
Francesco has 20 years’ experience in IT and cyber security and joined Standard Chartered Bank from PepsiCo where he was in charge of one of the two global Cyber Fusion Centers (Poland), leading globally incident response, red teaming, adversary emulation and cyber resilience.
He has hired hundreds of information security professionals in Poland and won the 2021 Volunteer of the Year award at ISSA.org, won the global innovation award from the US Consumer Brands Association in 2018 among Fortune-100 companies, and founded the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Special Interest Group at FIRST.org group.
Francesco has also been instrumental in developing the 2025 Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit & 2024 Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit. He has moderated many sessions and continues to contribute to this annual event.
See Francesco Chiarini‘s full profile.
Calin Gheorghiu – Co-Chairman Cyber Resilience SIG and CTO, Target Zero and Managing Principal, Risk Vector
Calin Gheorghiu is a threat-informed cyber resilience leader with over ten years of experience driving business-aligned security, crisis readiness, and rapid recovery programs for global enterprises across pharmaceuticals, banking, and technology. He currently serves as Global Head of Cyber Resilience & Continuity at Sandoz, where he leads enterprise-wide recovery engineering, crisis management, and critical asset defense programs. He is also the Founder and Principal of Risk Vector, an advisory firm delivering hands-on services across cyber crisis readiness, security operations, and technology risk management. Previously, he held senior positions at Goldman Sachs as Executive Director and Head of Tech Risk Assessment & Advisory, and at Standard Chartered Bank as VP and Head of Cyber Resilience, where he shaped adversary-focused risk frameworks and delivered regulatory-aligned resilience strategies. He is co-developer of the High Value Target methodology and Co-Chair of the ISSA Cyber Resilience Special Interest Group.
Calin has a consistent track record of translating complex threat landscapes into actionable defense and recovery strategies for executive, regulatory, and engineering stakeholders. He holds industry certifications including CISM and CRISC, and has represented his organizations in engagements with PRA, the FSB FIRE Working Group, and EU NIS-2 and DORA implementation forums.
Speaker/s
ISSA Webinars and Conference series cover all the continuing education credits to maintain your cyber security certifications. (CPEs, CEUs, ECE, etc). Each hour is equal to one continuing education credit. Certificates of completion are available upon request after completion. For instructions, click here.