fwd:cloudsec North America 2025

Know Before You Go

Location

fwd:cloudsec will be held at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Denver Downtown Convention. fwd:cloudsec will be held on the third floor, so take the elevator from either the ground floor, or the lobby (4th floor).

If you’re coming into Denver International Airport (DIA), you can take the rail line to Union Station, and the hotel is a short 1.2km / 0.8 mile walk. The rail should cost you $10, while an Uber can be about $75. Details on the light rail can be found here: https://www.denver.org/about-denver/transportation/denver-airport-rail/ The only parking at the hotel is valet parking for $60 per day. The hotel has both a Starbucks (ground level) and restaurant and bar (lobby level) for your hallway con needs.

If you’re staying at the Embassy Suites but didn’t book through our reservation link, please let us know at hotel@fwdcloudsec.org. This will help us ensure we get credit for our room block commitments.

Wifi will be available throughout the event.

Badge Pickup

The registration table will open at 7:30am on Monday, June 30th, on the third floor of the Embassy Suites. Someone will be staffing the registration table all day, so don’t worry if you show up a bit late.

Schedule

The session schedule can be found on our website and PreTalx.

Monday June 30th

(all times are Mountian Daylight Time)

Tuesday, July 1st

Sponsors

We cannot have fwd:cloudsec without the support of our wonderful sponsors. They’ll have tables setup outside the conference rooms, and are looking to engage with the top minds in cloud security (that’s you).

Meals

Thanks to our generous sponsors, fwd:cloudsec will be providing a box lunch both days. Coffee and Tea will be available all day. While there is no official after-party this year, there are several un-official events being hosted by our sponsors and the cloud security community. Get the details in #fwdcloudsec-social slack.

Slack

Are you a member of the Cloud Security Forum Slack? If not, you should join. There are a number of channels related to fwd:cloudsec including: #fwdcloudsec - General discussions and Q&A for remote participants #fwdcloudsec-social - Discussions around fun activities to do before and after the show and hangout and hallway con planning

Birds of a Feather and Hallway Con

Part of the fwd:cloudsec experience is networking with each other. We’ve reserved plenty of space for our attendees to congregate. We’ll be returning to our roots this year with the Birds of a Feather sessions. There will be voting on site for sessions. Here are some ideas but you can email us more ideas at bof@fwdcloudsec.org or add your ideas at registration. We’re also looking for volunteer facilitators.

Possible topics:

• Security + the challenges of sovereign clouds
• This will be our 5th in-person fwd:cloudsec in the US. What do you want to see us do differently in future years?
• (related to above) The ratio of practitioner to vendor talks keeps decreasing year over year toward having more vendor talks. What can we do to swing back toward more practitioner talks? How can we encourage more speakers? Should we shrink to one day or maybe expand to allow talks that are more aimed toward AppSec or SaaS?
• What AI/ML/LLM security problems do you face in your day job? What sort of knowledge are you lacking?
• Multi-CNAPP: We talk about multi-cloud, but a lot of folks might be multi-CNAPP (due to different business units or acquisitions, or maybe one vendor acquires and adds capabilities that you used another vendor for). Lessons learned?
• Is cloud security becoming easier? Better? Is shadow IT more of a problem? Do you have more or less visibility?
• OSS: In 2019, there seemed to be a lot of open-source cloud security projects but many of these were commercialized or were abandoned. Are there areas today where people lean on OSS? Will the ease of coding with genAI and MCPs bring a return?

All Birds of a Feather sessions will follow three basic rules:

• Chatham house rule
• No recording of any type
• Can disagree but be respectful (i.e. don’t be a jerk)

If you’re interested in hosting a Birds-of-a-Feather session, there will be a sign-up board at registration. You’ll be able to propose topics and attendees can vote which topics resonate with them.

We’ll also have a Media Room if you want to record a podcast, and a quiet meditation room for anyone who needs a break from socializing.

Ticket Transfers

Can’t attend? You’ve got two options. You can request a refund before Sunday June 23th at 11:59pm ET, and fwd:cloudsec will offer your ticket to someone on the waitlist. Or you can update the name and email address on the registration to your new best friend who will then be registered for the conference. Transfers should be done by June 29th in order to ensure badges are printed and available onsite, but we can support ticket transfers at registration if necessary.

Post Event

After the event we will be sending out a post event survey. This is really important for us to plan future events. The session live streams will remain on YouTube until the individual sessions are cut and available for individual watching.