Virtual events take a lot of planning, and in some cases, they take more planning and preparation than in-person events. While many in-person events do have some type of security detail, the cybersecurity needs of a virtual event typically outweigh them by far.
Cybercriminals may not present a physical threat to your participants and attendees but they can affect their financial and emotional well-being as well as your own. There are several reasons why cybersecurity is critical for virtual events.
Maintain Safety Without Missing Valuable Information
Before and during your virtual event, you want to be able to collect information from your attendees. This could include their contact information, demographic data, location, and so on.
This allows you to analyze your audience, create easy ways to connect attendees with exhibitors, survey participants, and more. However, you can only do this ethically if you can adequately protect that information.
Provide Secure Payments
You want to be able to monetize your virtual event. That might happen in the form of paid attendance tickets, paid sponsorships, paid exhibitor slots, and so on.
In order to do this, though, you must be able to securely process those customers’ payments. If you compromise their data, you could be financially liable and you’re likely to lose their trust too.
Avoid Potential Session Interruptions
You may remember that early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there were often issues with hackers breaking into Zoom meetings. From there, they could do whatever they wanted, from interrupting the meeting with loud noises to exposing inappropriate content.
The same could happen in your virtual event if you don’t use a secure platform and protect your technical integrity. Allowing a hacker to compromise or delete presentation materials could take away the value you promised to attendees and result in the need for mass refunds you can’t afford.
Secure the Integrity of Paid Attendance
One way many virtual event hosts monetize their work is by setting a ticket price for attendees. In this case, it’s critical to have cybersecurity safeguards that prevent hackers from getting into the event without paying.
If not, chances are that the word will get out and your paying participants may feel used or disrespected. Of course, it takes away from your revenue as well.
Protect Your Professional Reputation
A well-run, productive virtual event could skyrocket your professional reputation. On the other hand, a virtual event that is poorly run or worse, compromises participants’ valuable data, will damage that reputation to a great degree. In this way, securing your event doesn’t just protect your revenue for this event but for the remainder of your career or your organization’s life. Compromises your reputation if you are hacked.
How to Build Better Security for Your Virtual Event
PCybersecurity is understandably a stressful topic for many virtual event hosts, but it’s one that is important nonetheless. It all starts with choosing an established and secure virtual event platform, so learn more about what Canapii has to offer.
Get in touch with us if you have questions or feedback on these tips. We love hearing from the Canapii community how we can keep innovating to make our tools even better.
Canapii provides unique solutions to manage in-person, hybrid and virtual events. As the only supplier with genuine 24/7 customer service, our global team lives and breathes events, no matter their location or size. Canapii has over 45,000 users and is used by 5000+ companies. By being ahead of the innovation curve, we enable our customers to impress their audiences every step of the way.
