Excerpts from Maria Iacono’s Interview
Dawn Liphardt – What will be the highlights of this 25th edition of the Assises?
Maria Iacono – For this 25th edition, we aimed to mark the moment with a strong theme, not chosen at the last minute, but built up gradually throughout the year with the community. The Assises isn’t just an October event: there is a whole body of preparation work upstream.
And this year, the theme is “FUTURES,” with an S at the end, in uppercase. It isn’t a mistake, it’s intentional. The idea isn’t only to celebrate the 25 years of the community, but above all to project ourselves forward, sharing several possible visions of the future. Because there isn’t a single future: there are many, spanning technological, geopolitical, and organizational aspects, as businesses evolve and transform significantly.
The question behind all of this is: what role will cybersecurity play in these varied futures?
And the throughline remains the same: cybersecurity isn’t there for itself, but to serve the business, the organizations and the employees.
Dawn Liphardt – Is this idea of serving the business lines more important than value creation?
Maria Iacono – Yes, clearly, we’ve seen a real paradigm shift in recent years. And that’s the fruit of more than 25 years of work by our members and our cybersecurity experts. Today, cybersecurity can no longer be viewed as a “cost center”; that approach no longer works, especially under economic pressure and budget constraints.
What has changed is the posture: cybersecurity now delivers real value to the organization, contributing to strategy and upstream defense. And that’s why our experts, our CISOs, are working more closely than ever with business teams, with procurement, with legal, and with all stakeholders. Their role has become central within the company.
Dawn Liphardt – Sovereignty is a topic we discuss at length. How will you approach it?
Maria Iacono – This is a multifactorial subject, so there isn’t a single answer. We’ve planned several formats: on one hand, there will be roundtables truly focused on European digital sovereignty — where we stand, and above all what we must do now. There will also be presentations of solutions, and even American players who will come to explore how we can move forward together, overcome certain dead ends, and continue collaborating. And of course there are all the one-to-one meetings that allow us to go even further.
The truth is there isn’t a single solution, not even a purely French solution today. The answers are multiple. And what changes most is the stance of our CISOs and cyber experts: they are far more demanding.
The keyword is exigence (rigor). The experts today demand a lot more transparency and visibility into what happens behind the data they entrust, and that marks a real paradigm shift.
