Are you curious about Cybersecurity? If so, consider MIS 3520 Data Communications and Networking as one of your electives. We talk about a lot of technology but we start from the beginning. You don’t need to be a business analytics or management information systems major, just interested.
Every organization is networked and cloud connected with key business processes that rely on information systems. It is a significant business risk if those information systems are not properly secured. This is not just a computer nerd issue, it’s a critical business issue.
As a manager, it’s important for you to understand the key security risks faced by business and potential mitigations for those risks. This gives you the tools to make intelligent decisions for protecting your organization. At minimum you need the vocabulary to communicate with your cyberinsurance provider, vendors, and your own IT department.
To understand cybersecurity risks and mitigations, you need to learn about some of the technology. In this course, we cover:
- Computing infrastructure
- hardware, software, storage, virtualization, cloud services
- Networking fundamentals
- protocol, IP addressing, DNS, network devices, wired vs wireless networking
- Core security concepts
- confidentiality, integrity, availability, authorization
- threat modeling and risk assessment, common security risks
- Cryptography and PKI
- types of encryption, certificates and PKI, TLS/SSL, data encryption, digital signatures
- Identity and authentication
- authentication methods, multi-factor authentication, passwordless authentication
- identies and directory services, LDAP, single sign-on, federation
- Application availability and recovery
- preventing outages with business processes
- backup and recovery, high availability, data replication
- Network security
- network segmentation, firewalls, remote access, virtual private networks (VPNs)
- wide area networks, zero trust networking
- Incident response
- NIST Incident Response Recommendations and Considerations for Cybersecurity Risk Management
- CISA Cybersecurity Incident & Vulnerability Response Playbooks
Learning about all of this technology is great fun, but to really understand things it helps to have experience applying this knowledge. There are hands-on activities that have you:
- Register your own domain name and configure DNS records
- Create and publish a web site
- Create and configure a Microsoft 365 tenant
- Manage content versioning and deployment by using Github and Visual Studio Code
- Create a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure
- Configure a VPN and firewall