Before we get to the burning questions from ASIS Europe 2025, I’ll let you in on a little secret… unbeknownst to many, ASIS International turned 70 this year!
The organization’s core mission remains the same in helping security professionals:
- Share reliable information
- Establish global standards
- Enhance collaboration
Team Nedap wishes ASIS a very happy 70th birthday! 🥳
I won’t share how old I turn this year, but I will say that I very much appreciated my 9th year attending ASIS Europe.
And that this year’s host city, Dublin, did not disappoint.
But with so much happening around global relations, it’s an understatement to say that connecting with other security professionals was worthwhile. If anything, ASIS Europe 2025 couldn’t have come at a better time for the purposes of sharing stories and insights around international affairs—and the impact on security.
So, let’s get to some highlights, in the form of 7 burning questions asked in Dublin…
1. Is the juice worth the squeeze?
I’m quoting Ed McLaughlin here, President and Chief Technology Officer at Mastercard.
“Is the juice worth the squeeze…”
This has stuck with me even days after his opening keynote session.
McLaughlin spoke extensively about trust, and its fragility, equating to security. With huge shifts happening all over the world, how can we keep trust intact if “trust is security” and drive home the point that security can add real value to business?
Beyond dealing with “bad actors” and “non-human actors,” technology should be available and reliable to its users. This is how you build trust with your customers. So, back to this idea of whether the juice is worth the squeeze…does the effort justify the outcome?
For example: Reducing false positives as much as possible, for Mastercard, involves legitimate credit card transactions that are declined due to overly sensitive fraud detection parameters. It’s happened to me. Maybe it’s happened to you too? When you’re trying to purchase something with your card and the transaction’s declined with no real reason?
This can be so frustrating and damage your experience as a cardholder. So, it’s something that Mastercard tries to reduce as much as possible. Because, if you can’t use your card then your trust in the card company fades.
But the same can then be applied to access control. A system might incorrectly grant access to someone who’s unauthorized person, or an alert might be triggered by a rule that’s been written too broadly when there’s no actual security threat. Triggers can then be escalated unnecessarily, causing disruptions, costing time and resources that could have been better used elsewhere. This is not how you add value to a business.
The cost-benefit or the “juice squeezed”, could be doing more harm than good? It’s worth thinking about…
2. Is the world actually becoming more dangerous?
This was a question that provided much food for thought at ASIS Europe 2025. The juxtaposition of perception versus reality of global security…
Is it the world that’s becoming more dangerous? Or just a certain population of people, who have taken over extremely powerful positions, creating new problems in the world?
Seeing the huge impact that social media has on people’s perception of reality (which has definitely spilled over to LinkedIn where talk of politics has all but saturated our timelines, but isn’t business intertwined with geopolitical tensions?),
I didn’t expect to touch this subject in a post-event blog about ASIS Europe, but here we are. It’s difficult NOT to, when there’s a constant churn of events. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to stay agile and hyper-aware of perception versus reality, so that we can go from reactive to proactive.
3. How are you (or not) navigating NIS2?
Do you know what the chances are that your organization will fall prey to burglary? 1 in 250.
What about the risk of fire? 1 in 8000.
And cyberattacks? 1 in 5. That’s a 20% chance you’re taking every day.
This is why the NIS2 directive significantly expands regulatory compliance. Originally meant for organizations falling under “critical national infrastructure,” there are now more sectors included in NIS2.
As security professionals, we’d probably all agree that it shouldn’t take NIS2 to make cybersecurity a priority. And it should certainly be a shared responsibility, requiring leadership buy-in and understanding to start the chain of change management inside your organization.
Because NIS2 will not go away, and there’s no point in delaying the inevitable. Has your organization taken the steps to comply? NIS2 explicitly requires affected organisations to implement good physical access control as well.
Tell me more about NIS2 and access control
4. How far is AI on the “edge” of trust?
Trust.
Yes.
This word came up time and time again during ASIS Europe 2025, and it came up again during Orphan Topcu’s session on “AI and Physical Security.”
Topcu, who’s the Senior Regional Security Manager for North-West Europe & Türkiye at Microsoft, spoke of two groups of people:
- People who like and use AI
- People who don’t
I won’t ask you which group you fall in, but I will tell you this:
Organizations who don’t embrace AI for its innovation and resist its adoption, however, will most likely fall behind. And I don’t say this lightly. As Topcu highlighted, AI isn’t perfect and can sometimes go wrong (e.g. Microsoft’s Tay chatbot that went rogue), but AI isn’t just a tool or a program. It’s an agent.
Whether you like it or not, AI is evolving beyond being a passive instrument that answers even our most mundane questions. When it comes to function, autonomy, decision-making and more…emerging technologies like bio-genetics and robotics will further converge and weave together with AI, which will surely reshape the security landscape as we know it.
5. To Guinness or not to Guinness?
It wasn’t Shakespeare who asked this, but it was indeed the most pressing question on everyone’s mind at the Security Leaders Networking Dinner, powered by Nedap, hosted at the renowned Guinness Storehouse.
This dinner is always a highlight of each event for several reasons. No matter the changing times, there’s still something very special about “breaking bread” with members of your community. And at Nedap, we’re very proud to have invested in building such a community around security leaders.
What happens at Guinness, stays at Guinness, and we can’t share with you the countless conversations that happened, but we can surely share some captured moments in photos here, care of ASIS International:
6. How do you play Buzzword Bingo?
Well, the short answer is…you shouldn’t!
If you attended Nedap’s Innovation Track Session called “Bye Bye Buzzword Bingo” then you probably knew this already. If not, please let me explain…
This session was hosted by Nedap’s Head of Technology, Maikel Coenen, and our Market Solutions Director, Daniël Nijkamp, and it was a call, a collective call, for all of us to stop spreading the industry buzzwords we’ve all come to love and hate.
In fact, if you were at ASIS Europe 2025, you might have seen our Bingo Card/Coasters lying around. We wanted to start an anti-buzzword revolution.
We’ve already got a head-start with digital twinning—a powerful tool that creates a precise digital replica of your physical environment. Do you want to hear more about it?
Tell me more about digital twinning
7. Would you let a good crisis go to waste?
We might not all strive to be like Winston Churchill in the face of adversity, but as an industry, we can all learn from this notion of not letting a good crisis go to waste.
The opening keynote on the final day of ASIS Europe 2025 helped us do just that. With an all-star lineup of CSOs on the panel, there was real talk about what readiness and resilience looks like in 2025 for security.
The importance of proactiveness versus reactiveness came up again, specific to insider threats. It made us all question what the human factors are in security risks. It’s not enough for security leaders to simply look outside for threats, but to have a holistic 360-degree approach mixed with different dimensions and combined disciplines.
There was talk of what the key drivers of insider threats could be, and that behavioral monitoring could aid in proactive prevention. But ultimately, the conclusion was the culture is your best asset.
The best offense is an organizational culture defense. Fostering a company culture of engagement, awareness, and early intervention can prevent internal threats before they escalate. Learning from past events and applying those learnings to create a reporting culture is crucial for readiness and resilience.
I don’t know how many nostalgic GI Joe fans there are reading this, but there was a famous line that the action figure always shared at the end of each cartoon episode:
“Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.”
Winston Churchill and GI Joe might have been good friends in some parallel universe.
But I digress…
Bidding ASIS Europe 2025 farewell…for now…
It’s that time of year again, where we bid farewell to this edition of ASIS Europe. Always a mixed bag of feelings. But we will always have these post-event blogs to look back on…
I’m looking forward to celebrating a decade of ASIS Europe events next year in Antwerp, Belgium. My 10th event should be set in tin (or aluminum?) according to traditional standards…
I’ll let you know how I end up commemorating my 10th!
See you in Antwerp!
