Six months after missile and drone strikes disrupted airports and critical infrastructure across the Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz was effectively shut down for commercial shipping, organizations are still reckoning with the operational and cyber consequences of the conflict.

Amid heightened hacktivist activity and opportunistic cyberattacks, many institutions learned hard lessons about identity security, crisis governance, and business continuity when both physical and digital systems were under pressure.

In this keynote, Olivier Busolini, Group CISO at Mashreq Bank, reflects on what truly mattered: Protecting people during kinetic disruptions, keeping operations running despite supply‑chain paralysis, and strengthening resilience when threats came simultaneously from the sky and the network.