Monique Morrow

Why organisations work with Monique Morrow

• She speaks about cybersecurity and digital infrastructure as someone who built it. As the first CTO of Cisco Services and later CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering, she sat in the architecture seat through Cisco’s expansion into cloud, IoT and emerging networks.
• The standards organisations will operate under in extended reality and metaverse systems are partly being written by her. She chairs IEEE P7030 and IEEE P7016, two of the few global working groups defining how these technologies are assessed and built.
• Engineering credibility that few cybersecurity speakers match. More than seventeen USPTO patents covering networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling, plus three published technical books, mean she does not need to translate from analyst-speak.
• Board-level visibility into how distributed ledger governance actually works. As an Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, she sees decisions on a major public DLT network being made, not just commented on.
• Her digital identity work has been pressure-tested against the hardest cases. Through The Humanized Internet, she has built frameworks for portable, self-sovereign identity for stateless and displaced populations, which sharpens her perspective on identity systems for corporate users.

Biography highlights

• President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, the Switzerland-based non-profit advancing self-sovereign digital identity for stateless and displaced populations
• Former first CTO of Cisco Services and CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering at Cisco; previously Senior Distinguished Architect for Emerging Technologies at Syniverse Technologies
• Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, governing one of the larger public distributed ledger networks
• Chair of IEEE P7030 (global extended reality assessment standard) and IEEE P7016 (Standard for Ethically Aligned Design and Operation of Metaverse Systems)
• Co-author of The Humanized Internet (River Publishers, 2023), The Internet of Women (River Publishers, 2016) and Developing IP-Based Services (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003)
• Holder of more than seventeen USPTO patents in networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling; named one of Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech globally (2018)

Biography

Distributed ledger systems, extended reality platforms and digital identity protocols are being built faster than the governance around them. Once they scale, the rules embedded in them are very hard to remove. The decisions that matter most are being made at the architecture layer, often in working groups most senior leaders cannot name.

Monique Morrow has spent more than twenty-five years inside that layer. She was the first CTO of Cisco Services and later CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering. The brief was to read economics, technology and research together and identify what was coming next for the business. She holds more than seventeen USPTO patents in networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling, and in 2005 was named Cisco’s first Distinguished Consulting Engineer.

She is President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, the Swiss non-profit working on portable, self-sovereign digital identity for the more than one billion people without legal identity. Her 2023 book of the same name from River Publishers makes the argument that identity systems built for stateless and displaced populations produce more robust architecture than systems built for corporate convenience.

She chairs IEEE P7030, the global working group writing the assessment standard for extended reality, and IEEE P7016, the standard for ethically aligned metaverse design. She also sits as an Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, where governance of one of the larger public distributed ledger networks is decided. The rules organisations will operate under in the next decade are being drafted in rooms she chairs.

Key speaking topics

• Cybersecurity strategy and risk
• Digital identity and self-sovereign identity systems
• Extended reality and metaverse governance
• Distributed ledger and blockchain infrastructure
• Privacy and data governance
• Ethics in emerging technology
• Standards and governance for AI and connected systems

Ideal for

• CISOs, CTOs and chief digital officers setting cybersecurity and emerging technology direction
• Boards and audit committees scrutinising digital identity, AI and distributed ledger exposure
• Telecommunications, financial services and infrastructure organisations weighing investments in DLT, XR and biometric systems
• Policy and standards bodies shaping technology governance frameworks

Audience outcomes

• Sharper view of where the actual risks sit in their cybersecurity and emerging technology architecture, separated from vendor noise
• Working knowledge of the IEEE, GSMA and WEF standards that will shape extended reality, distributed ledger and digital identity over the next five years
• Grounded perspective on what self-sovereign identity actually requires, from someone building systems for the hardest cases
• Specific questions to put to vendors and regulators on AI ethics, DLT governance and XR deployment
• A view of where the next set of regulatory and reputational pressures on emerging technology are likely to land