Archives: Seminar

[1 CPE] Technology Leading the Way in Spokane Wildfire Relief Efforts

  Presented by Dan Wordell, Chief Information Security Officer & Kevin Freibott, Sr Planner • City of Spokane

Join Dan Wordell and Kevin Freibott from the City of Spokane as they share how the City leveraged Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to power the response and recovery effort following this summer’s devastating wildfires. They’ll offer an inside look at how technology helped ensure that both response and recovery were driven by accurate, up-to-date information — and highlight the constellation of data sources and tools deployed by the City, the County, and the region during a fast-moving emergency where good information helped save homes and rebuild lives.

This past August, the Spokane region battled the fastest-spreading wildland fire in state history — a blaze that outpaced every effort to contain it. The Old Trails Fire tore through the City in a single day, destroying more than 500 homes and countless other structures across the City and surrounding County. New technologies proved critical both as the fire spread and throughout the recovery phase once the fires were under control.

Spokane has since announced a coordinated set of ordinances to ease the recovery process, including permit fee waivers, like-for-like rebuilding permissions, General Facilities Charge waivers, and more. The City also launched a new damage assessment and recovery dashboard, giving residents, staff, and partners across the City and County timely, accurate insight into structural damage.

These efforts were driven by cutting-edge assessment and analysis technologies — near-real-time imagery capture, satellite hotspot mapping, up-to-the-minute burn area data, and AI-assisted Pictometry and terrain comparisons that flagged likely damage before City staff could physically reenter burned areas. Just two days after the fire began, the City stood up a custom mobile application for on-site staff, enabling live damage assessment collection with built-in accuracy checks and multi-source confirmation. These efforts will be discussed and explored further during this session.

[1 CPE] What We’ve Learned Bringing AI Projects to Life

  Presented by Hunter Helfgott, Data & AI Consultant, & Hayden Busic, Data & AI Product Manager • Cerium Networks

AI is helping people work more efficiently, but what does it take to put AI to work where it can make a meaningful difference for your team?

In this session, we’ll take you behind the scenes of three AI projects we’ve taken from planning to live deployment. We’ll explore the business challenge each project tackled, how we built it, and the results it delivered. Along the way, we’ll share lessons from turning those plans into working solutions, why identifying the right business needs is important, and how to encourage user adoption.

You’ll leave this session with a practical look at AI in action and lessons you can apply to your own projects.

[1 CPE] Proving Cyber Resilience: Measuring Outcomes, Not Effort

  Presented by David Pier, Sr Sales Engineer • Horizon3

Most security programs measure effort — not outcomes. Organizations patch thousands of vulnerabilities, deploy dozens of tools, and run annual tabletop exercises… but when an attacker shows up, none of that matters.

What matters is whether they can prove their defenses actually work.

In this talk, Horizon3 shares how leading organizations are using autonomous pentesting to see their environment through the attacker’s eyes — continuously, safely, and at scale. By shifting from assumptions to proof, they’ve learned to:

  • Prioritize what’s exploitable. Focus limited resources on the weaknesses that truly put the business at risk that are known to be abused by threat actors.
  • Quickly fix what matters. Close the loop from find → fix → verify and reduce your exploitable attack surface.
  • Reduce attacker dwell time. Use pentest results to precisely deploy honeyTokens to detect compromise early, and to continuously prove your EDR and SIEM are tuned and working as intended.

Cyber resilience isn’t about being perfect — it’s about getting better over time. And the only perspective that truly matters is the attacker’s.

[1 CPE] When the Office Goes Offline: Staying Connected When Disaster Strikes

  Presented by Mark Vogl, Director of Microsoft Engineering Services, & Susan Anderson, Vice President of Sales

An evacuation order arrives in the middle of the workday. Employees leave the office, and the building becomes inaccessible. Once people are safe, can your team reach one another, keep customers informed, and continue essential work?

Whether the disruption comes from a wildfire, severe weather, or a human-caused incident, the challenge extends beyond the building. Moving services to the cloud can create confidence that work can continue from anywhere. But what still depends on infrastructure or applications back at the office? If your building lost power or connectivity, would employees still be able to sign in, make calls, access critical applications, and support customers? Are you sure? This session explores what it takes to keep communication and essential work moving when the places and systems you normally depend on cannot.

Join us for a practical discussion on building resilient communication strategies for the modern workplace. We’ll explore how organizations are modernizing voice, collaboration, messaging, and business continuity capabilities to ensure employees remain productive and customers stay connected, regardless of location, infrastructure failures, or changing business demands.

Learn from real-world experiences and discover the architectural, operational, and compliance considerations that help separate organizations that recover quickly from those that struggle when communication matters most.

You’ll walk away with actionable strategies for:

  • Modernizing voice and collaboration platforms
  • Ensuring E911 and location compliance for hybrid workers
  • Designing for high availability and geographic resiliency
  • Building business continuity and communication failover plans
  • Supporting a distributed workforce without increasing operational complexity
  • Reducing risk from aging infrastructure and legacy systems
  • Maintaining seamless communication with employees, customers, and partners during disruptions

Whether you’re responsible for collaboration platforms, infrastructure, networking, security, end-user computing, or business continuity planning, this session will help you identify hidden risks, avoid costly mistakes, and build a communications foundation ready for the next decade of work.

Mark Vogl, Director of Microsoft Engineering Services, Cerium Networks

Mark Vogl is a collaboration and cloud calling expert with more than 20 years of experience helping organizations navigate the changing world of enterprise communications. As a Senior Collaboration Engineer at Cerium Networks, Mark specializes in Collaboration Systems, with experience spanning Microsoft 365, Teams, AudioCodes, Cisco Webex, Zoom, Avaya, various contact center platforms, and other related collaboration technologies.

A Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM), Mark combines technical expertise with a practical understanding of the business challenges organizations face when modernizing communications. Since joining Cerium in 2005, he has experienced firsthand the evolution of the modern workplace and has worked with organizations on the transition from traditional voice systems to cloud-based calling and collaboration.

Mark brings a real-world perspective to the opportunities and challenges of modern workplace communications, helping audiences understand not just what the technology can do, but how to put it to work effectively.

Susan Anderson, Vice President of Sales, Cerium Networks

Susan Anderson is the Vice President of Sales at Cerium Networks, where she partners with organizations across the Pacific Northwest to help them leverage technology to solve business challenges, improve employee and customer experiences, and achieve strategic growth objectives. She leads Cerium’s sales organization and works closely with clients to align technology investments with measurable business outcomes. As Vice President of Sales at Cerium Networks, she is responsible for sales strategy and business development.

With a passion for building lasting client relationships, Susan brings a consultative approach to every engagement, helping organizations navigate digital transformation, modern work, cybersecurity, cloud, collaboration, contact center, and managed services initiatives. Her focus is not simply on technology adoption, but on ensuring technology creates meaningful value for employees, customers, and the business.

Susan is known for her ability to connect business strategy with practical execution, bringing together people, process, and technology to help organizations innovate, grow, and prepare for the future. She is particularly passionate about helping clients simplify complexity, accelerate results, and maximize the value of their technology investments.

[1 CPE] Beyond the Box: Rethinking IT Deployment at Scale

  Presented by Samer Kandah, Sr Solutions Architect • C1

Organizations spend significant time evaluating and purchasing new technology, but the success of a modernization initiative often depends on what happens after the equipment arrives. Configuration, asset tracking, staging, logistics, and deployment can quickly become operational bottlenecks at scale. This session will explore how IT organizations can rethink technology deployment as a repeatable and scalable lifecycle. We’ll look at strategies for centralizing configuration and staging, improving asset visibility, reducing the amount of work required onsite, and creating more consistent deployment outcomes. We’ll also discuss how automation, zero-touch provisioning, and emerging AI capabilities can improve these processes and help organizations get technology into the hands of their users faster and with less disruption to their internal IT teams.

[1 CPE] Why Layered Identity Defense Is the Best Offense

  Presented by Sean Deuby, Principal Technologist, Americas • Semperis

Cyberattackers are adept at finding ways through your defenses and into identity systems like Active Directory, Entra ID, and Okta, and endpoint defenses won’t stop them. From there, they can move laterally, escalate privileges, access sensitive data and resources, and inject malware or ransomware.

AI has supercharged these attacks through automation and making it easy for unsophisticated actors to execute sophisticated attacks. One consistent lesson has come from experiences with frontier AI models and agents: identity protection has become even more important than it already was.

Implementing a layered defense that includes identity threat detection and response (ITDR) and robust identity recovery is key to true cyber resilience.

Advisory Council Roundtables

Join us during the lunch hour for Advisory Council Roundtables, an interactive opportunity to connect with council members and peers on a variety of timely industry topics. Move freely between tables, share your perspective, and gather practical insights you can take back to your organization. These conversations are informal, high-value, and designed to spark ideas and connection.

Topics & Discussion Leaders:

  • IT Staffing: Onboarding for Success
    Shane Fuller, Assistant Director, Technology Services, Spokane Colleges
  • Managed Application Control
    Joe Sams, Information Systems Manager, Teck American, Inc.
  • Managing Infosec for the Small/Medium Business
    Dan Brown, Cybersecurity Advisor, CISA
  • Security Awareness: What Methods Work to “Secure the Human”
    Naci Seyhanli, IT Security Analyst, Spokane Regional Health District
  • Topic TBD
    Courtney Whitman, Manager, Identity and Access Management, STCU

[1 CPE] AI Changes Everything

  Presented by Michael Lippman, Regional Channel Systems Engineer • Fortinet

AI, data sovereignty, and identity are reshaping how organizations think about security. This panel discussion explores how to protect emerging AI workloads, maintain control of sensitive data, and provide secure access from anywhere.

Panelists:

  • Greg Still, Chief Executive Officer, Xiologix
  • Terry Patton, Technology Director, Wellpinit School District

[1 CPE] State of the Union: Annual Information Security Report

  Presented by Chad Spoden, Sr Information Security Consultant, Solution Architect Manager • FRSecure

The result of over 100 incident cases handled by the FRSecure response team in the last two years, Sr Information Security Consultant Chad Spoden will dive into the latest threats and response techniques you need to know—and what you can do to minimize the risk and impact of similar events. The breakdown will cover Business Email Compromise, Ransomware, and Internal Compromise. You can’t afford to miss it!