Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) is a non-profit membership organization that is dedicated to recruiting, retaining and advancing women in cybersecurity. They offers mentoring, learning, networking, and career development to women at all stages of their cyber security careers. Every year, WiCyS set up an in-person event to recruit, retain and advance women in cybersecurity. However, this year the management went forward with a virtual event. Why?

As thousands of scheduled events were affected by the COVID-19 chaos, so was WiCyS's spring event. But this kind of a challenge was one that the WiCyS was ready to embrace, and face with hyper-focused steps to move forward.

While on the brink of cancellation, the leadership team could not undermine the dedication and the time invested for over a year into making this event a success. So, keeping under consideration the lack of viability of an in-person event during the covid, they devised a strategy to pivot towards a virtual event to ensure the outcomes that they had planned for. The aim was to create an environment where people felt they belonged, could collaborate and grow together, and WiCys Virtual 20 was going to be nothing less of it.