By Wendy Rager and Adrian Mohuczy-Dominiak.
The Cyber-Risk Coordination Center (C3), responsible for enhancing cybersecurity system wide and hosts of the Cyber Security Summit, recently won the inaugural UC Tech Awards Program Golden Award for IT Security. Their quick and skillful responses to the challenges of the pandemic resulted in high engagement and satisfaction scores for their summit.
About the Cyber Security Summit
The Cyber Security Summit brings together experts from across UC as well as vendors offering solutions relevant to cybersecurity. It is a collaborative effort entirely funded by sponsorship. Beginning in 2016, the UC Cyber Security Summit was established to promote collaboration through teamwork and learning opportunities with industry leaders and experts in the field. It does so by bringing together cybersecurity professionals as well as those working in legal, privacy and accessibility. The broad range of stakeholders facilitates meaningful conversation around the wide impact of these inter-dependent fields on cybersecurity.
In March of 2020, as the severity of the pandemic became clear, the summit planning team worked with their UC-wide network and pivoted to a specialized event-platform to quickly transform the 9th summit from an in-person event into a virtual one. The team attributes the successful transition to focused teamwork across the whole spectrum of those involved with the summit, including speakers, panelists, sponsors, vendors and attendees, in addition to everyone who worked to get the platform ready with less than a month.
A singular focus on attendee engagement
With only 25 days of lead time, the team needed to act swiftly and effectively and with absolute focus on attendee engagement. A third-party online platform provided remarkable flexibility for both speakers and sponsors which meant being able to offer webinars led by industry thought-leaders, as well as a panel discussion led by UC-experts. There were also opportunities to participate in systemwide chats on valuable topics that affected every member of our community, as well as updated messages from our sponsors.
Since the onset of the pandemic, the C3 team has hosted five (5) online conferences, building on the success of the first virtual summit in 2020. C3 has continued to increase attendance over time, with over 600 attendees in April 2022. The new, virtual summits have also maintained high satisfaction ratings (92%+), in-line with our in-person events, according to attendee survey feedback.
Benefits extend beyond event attendees
In addition to positive satisfaction among attendees, C3 happily serves as a resource to colleagues across the university seeking advice on online event management. The challenge of innovating events has provided an additional reason to collaborate across the university. We are available to work with all members of the UC Tech community, so feel free to contact us to discuss either cyber-security or event-planning, and we would be happy to help.
The Cyber Security Summit team included Wendy Rager, Adrian Mohuczy-Dominiak and Jackie Porter. To learn more about the team behind the award, please read the C3 UC Tech Cyber-security Summit Application.
To learn more about the Cyber-Security Summit, please visit the Cyber-Security Summit Conference landing page. Information about the April 19, 2023 conference will be added as it becomes available.
Wendy Rager is Manager, C3, ITS Department, University of California Office of the President
Adrian Mohuczy-Dominiak, IT Technical Security Analyst, C3, ITS Department, University of California Office of the President