Skip to content Skip to site navigation

In the Clouds at the 2022 CyberFest

Friday, November 11, 2022

Another Ivy+ Cybersecurity & Privacy Festival is in the books, and predictions were 100% accurate: It was indeed Cloudy with a Chance of Awesome on Oct. 26 and 27. 

If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry — we’ve made available session recordings, video shorts, and photos to help entice you to attend next year.

ribbon cutting
Stanford University's Chief Information Security Officer Amy R. Steagall and Chief Information Officer Steve Gallagher cut the ribbon to open the 2022 Ivy+ Cybersecurity & Privacy Festival

What you mist

For the first time since 2019, CyberFest attendees convened in person at the David and Joan Traitel Building at Hoover Institution for day one of the event. About 300 individuals from Stanford and the broader higher education community enjoyed cloud-themed merch and snacks, expo activities, and real face time with colleagues and friends. 

And in true hybrid fashion, the online event experience offered those who couldn’t make it in person a chance to tune in from anywhere. A total of over 600 online and in-person attendees were accounted for over two days.

We caught up with a few attendees in person to hear more about their experience in this "ISO-lated Moments" video. 

Cloud talks that aren’t over your head

What made this year’s CyberFest extra special? Amy R. Steagall, Stanford University's new chief information security officer had a few thoughts to share on the topic.

“This year’s theme, ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Awesome,’ was crowd-sourced by the Stanford IT community — something we’ve never done before. But this really set the stage early to make the serious topic of cloud security more tangible,” said Steagall. ‘’You can ask anyone on our planning committee — ideas [and weather puns] that tie in with the cloud theme were endless. And once you bring in the best minds of the security industry, it’s hard not to glean informative and practical insight from this year’s CyberFest.”

mugs
In-person attendees could get their hands on several cloud-themed "swag" items

As Steagall mentioned, the event featured prominent information security and privacy experts from across industries, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Harvard, Berkeley, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and more. They shared their knowledge and experience on security practices to both prevent and defend against cyber threats and led critical discussions on the future of cloud security. Catch up on a few of those cloud talks on this page.

panel
Left to right: Rob MaClay, Michael Mucha, Erwin Lopez, Amy R. Steagall, Jean-Raymond Pierre, and Todd Ferris represent Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, and SLAC in panel discussion
panel
M.K. Palmore, director in Google Cloud's Office of the CISO, chatting on stage with Noah Abrahamson, director of cloud security in Stanford University's Information Security Office

The opposite of a cold front

… is a warm back. If we still have your attention, we welcome feedback, warm or cold, to help continue to improve CyberFest each year.

So far, attendees seem to agree that the event was successful with 95% positive responses in the post-event survey. (Which, by the way, attendees can still submit if they haven’t yet.)

volunteers
Left to right: Shawn Kim and T.C. Chen, members of Stanford University's Information Security Office
student
Stanford student participating in the Lock Pick Workshop
priyanka
Priyanka Vergadia, staff developer advocate at Google and a featured CyberFest speaker
Share Feedback

DISCLAIMER: UIT News is accurate on the publication date. We do not update information in past news items. We do make every effort to keep our service information pages up-to-date. Please search our service pages at uit.stanford.edu/search.