Your feedback to Swiss Cyber Storm 2024

We’re a bit late with the conference feedback for Swiss Cyber Storm 2024, but I don’t want to launch 2025 without a proper and transparent review.

We received 62 responses, which is above 15%, an above average feedback rate for our conference. One reason could be the promise to give away a free ticket for SCS 2025 to those people who fill out the feedback form and leave their email address (so we can pick them).  Said winner has been chosen and I think it’s something we’ll do again this year.

Overall impression of the Swiss Cyber Storm conference

This is the first question, also meant to break the ice.  It’s a multiple-choice question and we stick to the same wording every year.  This gives us some baseline for the quality of the event:

57 % (2023: 54 %) It was a very interesting and cool event, keep it up and I’ll be back next year.
37 % (39 %) It was quite good – I will consider attending next year
6 % (7 %) It was okay, but I probably won’t go again.
0 % (0 %) Bad, I won’t go again

When we take the first two responses and the latter two together to get a positive/negative sentiment of the conference, we end up with the following numbers:

2024: 94 % positive / 6 % negative
2023: 93 % positive / 7 % negative
2022: 95 % positive / 5 % negative
2021: 96 % positive / 4 % negative
2020: no conference
2019: 91 % positive / 9 % negative
2018: 91 % positive / 9 % negative
2017: 89 % positive / 11 % negative

So, very positive, like it usually is from this perspective.

Average speaker rating

We ask our audience to rate all the speakers individually. We don’t share this information publicly for obvious reasons but we’re open to recommend speakers to other conferences (-> just get in touch). What we also do, though, is to calculate the average or mean speaker rating which gives us a pretty good idea of the quality of the work of the program committee.

The rating goes from 1 – bad to 2 – average to 3 – good to 4 – very good. Our speakers came in at 3.20, which is the 2nd best rating ever (after the 2021 conference where the audience was super excited to have a conference at all!)

2024: 3.20
2023: 3.02
2022: 3.19
2021: 3.34 (a fanboy audience with less attendees than usual)
2020: no conference
2019: 3.04
2018: 3.04
2017: 2.96

In 2023, we had two remote presentations and two weak speakers who did not perform very well. This pulled down the numbers. We had no such thing in 2024, and the numbers rebounded. We are very pleased with this result.

Choice of the focus theme “The AI Revolution”

95 % of our audience thought we had picked a good focus theme (“Good choice”) while 3 % did not like it. Another 2 % were not aware there was a focus theme at all, which is always a bit puzzling. But thanks for the honest answer.

95 % is the best score we ever got in this category. In hindsight, it was a homerun of course. But given we picked the focus theme in January, there was a substantial risk people would be fed up with AI by Autumn. We’ve been very lucky this was not the case. Not at all, apparently.

2024: 95 % (“The AI Revolution”)
2023: 93 % (“The Human Factor”)
2022: 92 % (“Digital Identities and How to Secure Them”)
2021: 88 % (“Securing the Supply Chain”)
2020: no conference (but it would have been “E-Health” 🙂)
2019: 83 % (“Embracing the Hackers”)
2018: 78 % (“Trust”)
2017: 67 % (“E-Voting”, but not very prominent)

95% will be hard to beat, but the topic we picked for 2025 might just do it!

Food and beverages

We no longer asked about the raffle, but we still have two questions about the food. 65 % (59 % in 2023) thought it was great, 29 % (27 %) found it good and 6 % (11 %) thought it was OK. 

Over 85 % (80 % in 2023) said there was enough food and 13 % (14 %) even said there was way too much. 2 % responded it was barely enough (4 %). Something to keep an eye on since it’s really hard to order the right amount of food, especially for the standing dinner after the conference.

Where did people hear about the conference

These numbers are always very interesting. Unlike with other questions, the answers here are not very stable. And they seem to be quite hard to influence. The thing that is clear is that colleagues are a very strong motivator for our audience.

53 % (2023: 58 %) – I’ve attended before
26 % (16 %) – Colleagues
10 % (15 %) – Through communication from a sponsor
5 % (2 %) – Through a partner organization (InsomniHack, SATW, Area41, etc.)
2 % (2 %) – Online articles in the media or blogs
2 % (2 %) – Social media
2 % (3 %) – Other

Speaker suggestions

We contacted a few speakers suggested in the 2023 feedback, but unfortunately none of them worked out. We’re keeping some of them on the list for the future. New additions are neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Rob van der Heer. Look them up if you are not familiar with these names. We’ll keep them in mind for future issues.

The next focus topic

We asked this for the first time to see what we might get from the audience. Top suggestions included two previously used focus topics (that’s OK, we’re aware that only very few participants attended every edition) and then risk management. Security culture is also very hot, as is quantum.

These would all be fine topics. But none of these proposals will be the 2025 focus theme. We’re soon ready to give the real one away, so stay tuned!

Summary

With a few numbers being slightly down in 2023, we rebounded in 2024 and we’re as eager as ever for the 2025 edition. Big news will be coming in a few weeks. So, stay tuned and don’t forget to get your early bird ticket in time for the conference on October 28, 2025!