Skip to main content

Jumping the Pond: Making the sideways move into CyberSec pt. 2


Following on from my last article, here’s some more information on changing industries for managers. Hopefully I didn’t put too many of you off switching careers in my previous article, where I explored what managerial life would look like in the InfoSec world. As a continuation, this post looks at which certifications are best to get you the necessary managerial competence in the field to start your new career.

Some of these do include a certain amount of technical training in the course material, others just look at concepts instead. Should you choose one of those, I would recommend at least doing some research into the technical side of things. While exploring free, online learning resources might not cut it completely, they are better then nothing and will help give you a grounding for when you choose to complete a recognised technical qualification.

Certifications


This will be by no means a comprehensive list of certs, but it will be enough to get you started and pointed in the right direction. As you haven’t spent your working years within IT or Cyber Security, getting yourself certified is a good, and quick, way of getting up-to-speed with the industry, its standards, and where it sits in terms of organisations and the wider world.

ISO27001 Foundation is a highly recommended place to start. Its purpose is to provide a managerial overview of Information Security, how to provide and document an Information Security Management System. This is but the first of several certifications available relating to the ISO27001 Standard, which lays out best practice for InfoSec.

ISACA’s CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) is one of the most prized certifications in the industry today, and almost certainly a requirement for senior management and for IT-related C-suite posts. Working your way through this certification will help you gain technical competence, and how to bridge the gap between Cyber Security practices and the rest of the business.

CISMP is a foundational certification from the BCS, The Charted Institute for IT. It is purpose-designed for anyone looking to get into the management structure through InfoSec, covering a range of topics including CyberSec, legislation, security standards and business continuity. Given its broad subject area, and the fact that it is run by the BCS, the Certificate in Information Security Management Principles would be a personal recommendation to breaking into CyberSec management.

CISSP from ISC2 is also a highly recommended certification to hold and course to take, but is a little more geared towards industry-experience management. To see more, I have written about this cert in an earlier blog, but thought it worth mentioning here as an idea of where you might want to start looking for future development.

These certifications, and their associated courses, are a small, but recommended selection for getting started on the transition into CyberSec management, and not the be all and end all. While certain types of threats, concerns and vulnerabilities will stay similar over time, the landscape is ever shifting, and will require constant training to ensure you and your teams are prepared and armed to combat the latest disaster-in-waiting.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Logical Fallacies - Why do they matter?

I came across a wonderful poster image by a talented artist, Michele Rosenthal , which depicts a robot debate: Granted, these aren't all the logical fallacies that exist, but it covers the most obvious, and most abused ones. But why are they important? We currently live in an age where we have access to more information that at any other point in history, and yet somehow we still think that arguing from emotion, or with our cognitive dissonance blinders on, is both right and acceptable: it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. Postmodernism may have a place, but not here. Yes, you absolutely are allowed to feel they way you want to, but debates are places for facts and ideas that need to be scrutinised rigorously, not with playground threats and character assassinations. "I feel" is not an argument that belongs in a debate - your feelings are valid for you, yes, but you can not simply refute the evidence-based assertion of vaccinations work with the st...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ancient and Venerable Art of Google-fu

Other titles considered for this post: How Not To Piss Off Entire Forums and Facebook Groups; Avoiding the Banhammer; Stop Being Lazy and Look it Up Yourselves. Before you can embark on a career in, well, anything even vaguely IT related (or do practically anything), you must master one crucial skill: information searching. In the days of yore, and even rumoured to still exist despite budget cuts, there were in of cult of specialists in this area, who guarded their domains jealously: the librarians. These knowledge-fanatics could divine what you were looking for from the ridiculously poor and mumbled explanation you gave them, then translated that into a secretive code which led you to a shelf in a library, and then to the book you were after. Just like magic. These days, while librarians are still a vitally important part of cataloguing knowledge, we also have another, less mystical, tool at our fingertips: the Search Engine. Unfortunately, very few people have bothered to le...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's all about the angles

I could describe the surroundings for you perfectly, down to the way the grain went on each of the wood panels on the floor, I could talk to you at great length concerning the cobwebs knocking at my door or the baying crane flies attacking the windows, baying for the bleeding luminescence seeping from the screen. I could go so far as to describe each and every instrument playing on the track I was listening to, the perfectly clear Irish lung-pipes of Cara Dillon’s songbird vocals. But I won’t, because none of that matters, at least not in this context, or perspective. It all comes down to angles you see. Not the angles of everything around us, but our angles. The tilt of the head to listen more intently, the hunch, or straightening of the back to become comfortable. The adjustment of glasses to see an image properly, or in this instance, to see the image no-one else may have seen. It doesn’t take much to shift your physical perception of anything, but it opens up a myriad new worlds, ...
Post a Comment
Read more