Thomas Karlsson is since early 2015 Project Manager within Go-to-Market Services at IDC Nordic. He has extensive experience in producing custom marketing and lead generating activities from previous employments, among others, the business newspaper Dagens industri and the business magazine Affärsvärlden. At IDC Thomas key focus is on delivering, together with IDCs analysts, the right content-based marketing solution to help support IDC clients reaching new contacts, leads and markets.

As research director for IDC’s European Security practice, Joel Stradling leads the content and analyst team for tracking the European security segment. His main focus area is the integration of network plus security and evolution of network architectures towards software-defined secure access.

Stradling has 20 years of experience as an analyst of international managed enterprise network and IT services. He is a regular speaker at major industry conferences talking about emerging technologies in B2B enterprise network and IT and wholesale carrier-to-carrier services. Joel is a well-known and highly regarded expert in the industry, offering insight and advice to C-level executives on technology competitive landscapes and emerging technologies, such as SD-WAN, 5G, SDN/NFV, and cyber-security.

Rob Shapland is an ethical hacker, spending his life breaking into companies worldwide to help them secure their systems against criminal attacks. His specialty is physical intrusion – breaking into company offices by dressing up as a cleaner, a fake employee or even as a Hollywood film producer and then stealing a computer from right under their nose. Rob’s unique approach to cybersecurity has earned him a reputation as one of the most exciting speakers in the industry. He is a seasoned speaker at events and conferences around Europe, and regularly appears on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, ITV, Channel 4 and others as a cyber security adviser.

Guido Grillenmeier is Semperis’ Principal Technologist, EMEA. Based in Germany, Guido was a Microsoft MVP for Directory Services for 12 years. He spent 20+ years at HP/HPE as Chief Engineer. A frequent presenter at technology conferences and contributor to technical journals, Guido is the co-author of Microsoft Windows Security Fundamentals. He’s helped various customers secure their Active Directory environments, and supported their transition to Windows 10/m365 and Azure cloud services.

With a deep interest in law, technology and business strategy, Sofia Edvardsen engages passionately in understanding and explaining the world’s emerging legal regulatory landscape for technologies. How can businesses prepare today for the regulations of the future? What should be done short term to position the industry for the long term considering what rules that then will apply?

With extensive experience as an attorney, she has worked closely with a wide range of organisations. That enables her to provide practical and realistic solutions to emerging legal challenges, also aiming to help make the right decisions based on an understanding of what is possible today and what the future might bring. She is the founding partner of Sharp Cookie Advisors (https://www.sharpcookie.se/en), a technology and digitization law firm based in Stockholm, Sweden. In her role there she represents sellers and buyers of cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models), software licensing and other technology transactions.

She also holds the role as Data Protection Officer for several global companies as well as start-ups. In addition, she provides services to Data Protection Programs for health care providers and companies in media, marketing, retail and tech. Sofia also leads the Swedish chapter of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). In that role, she facilitates the development of privacy-enhancing practices for the Swedish industry and the public sector.

Sofia Edvardsen graduated from School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg and has a degree from Chalmers University of Technology. She is a certified privacy professional and holds a CIPP/E certification. She has served as in-house legal counsel of a global telecom company, in-house legal counsel at a technology investment fund and as a lawyer in the Stockholm and London offices of Baker McKenzie law firm.