Fachhochschule Dortmund, in cooperation with “heise academy,” is hosting the third IT Security Day on its campus on Emil-Figge-Straße. The conference on September 16, 2026, is designed to facilitate the exchange of knowledge between academia and the regional business community. The program will focus on current challenges posed by artificial intelligence, strategies for digital sovereignty, and new approaches in IT forensics.
Given the dynamic threat landscape in cyberspace and the increasing integration of AI systems into business processes, IT managers are faced with the need for continuous adaptation. The IT Security Day addresses these developments. “We offer a forum to align the current state of research with the requirements of business practice,” says Prof. Dr. Daniel Hamburg, Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at Fachhochschule Dortmund.
The program features presentations by female experts from the IT industry—including topics such as the risks of large language models (LLMs) and cyber resilience in small and medium-sized enterprises. Subsequent panel discussions will provide an opportunity for direct exchange with the speakers.
Digital Sovereignty
Together with Prof. Dr. Gabriele Kunau, professor of information systems and business informatics at Fachhochschule Dortmund, Prof. Dr. Daniel Hamburg will deliver the opening presentation at the symposium. Under the title “Digital Sovereignty in Theory and Practice,” the two will analyze what this frequently used term really means and why digital sovereignty is so relevant for society, businesses, and government agencies today. “Digital sovereignty is a very complex topic and is not limited to individual technical measures such as switching cloud providers. It involves an interplay of technical and social factors,” says Prof. Kunau. Building awareness is the first necessary step toward reducing dependencies.
Network Analysis in Cloud and High-Speed Environments
Prof. Dr. Daniel Spiekermann (Distributed Data Systems) and Prof. Dr. Holger Schmidt (IT Security) provide insight into the faculty’s current research activities. They will present the “C2PANDA” project. As part of this project, Fachhochschule Dortmund is creating a test environment—the only one of its kind in Germany—where realistic attack scenarios on modern, virtualized, and high-performance IT infrastructures can be simulated and new analysis methods developed—without putting real systems at risk. With this, the two experts are addressing professionals in the fields of incident response and digital forensics in particular.