Welcome to the Rocky Mountain Cyberspace Symposium 2023 (RMCS23)! The Rocky Mountain Chapter of AFCEA is honored to once again invite you to our annual forum for industry, academia, and government to discuss and propose solutions to the challenges of cybersecurity, community cyber readiness and homeland defense facing our nation. Our theme this year is "Post-Pandemic Zero Trust."

As our workforce emerges from the pandemic, modern demands for ubiquitous access to networks from unsecure locations lead to challenging new security dilemmas and a rise in the porosity of previously secure network perimeters.  Couple this with recent nation state aggressions that have been increasingly preceded and accompanied by significant cyberspace attacks and the stakes escalate even further.  Even once-highly-secure space assets are being progressively affected as commercially provided services play larger roles in defense systems. This new paradigm requires more consideration of how users can be granted access, and how security teams can monitor what users are doing with the access they’ve been granted in order to minimize risks.

Many senior cyber leaders both within and without of government have advocated zero-trust models to reduce risk exposure by eliminating unnecessary access and privileges across critical systems.  RMCS23 invites Government, Industry, and Academia to join us in an exploration of current requirements, best practices, and case studies in the application of zero trust, least privilege, contextual authentication, exception-based security and similar technologies to our current post-pandemic security environment.

Our Exhibit Hall is full of industry, government, academia and non-profit organizations that will give you the opportunity to learn about cutting edge cyber technologies relevant to these challenges, and the chance to share your own ideas with peers from across the nation. Whether you are an individual attendee, a sponsor, an exhibitor, a speaker, or one of our many volunteers, we know you’ll find this year’s symposium a world-class event, hosted at a world-class venue … with no entrance fee for military and government attendees. 

Our Cyberspace Symposium not only brings us together to exchange ideas related to today's toughest cyber challenges, but it also allows our chapter to make a tremendous investment in the future of technical fields -- consistently giving out more than $300,000 for scholarships, grants and other STEM related activities across the community annually!

RMCS23 is poised to be another great event. I hope you will join us in making this yet another successful symposium!

Rich Janoso, Colonel, USAF (Ret)

Chairman, RMCS23