Risk Management for Cybersecurity and IT Managers
Have you ever wondered why your organization’s executives or your manager made a decision to fund or not fund your project?
In this course, you will get an inside look at how cybersecurity and information technology (IT) managers determine which projects they will support with funding, and which they won’t, based on a preliminary risk analysis. Over the past two decades, I have worked in the cybersecurity and information technology realm, fighting for my projects to be funded. Early in my career, I didn’t understand why certain projects would be funded and executed, while others wouldn’t. What I learned, is that it all came down to Risk Management by our executives and managers.
You will learn the terms used by executives and managers in discussing Risk Management, and how to apply the concepts of Risk Management to your networks, systems, and projects. This course is not an operational or tactical course that focuses on how you will secure your networks, but instead focuses on the mindset of managers and teaches you how to think like they do. Once you master these concepts, it is much easier to build your business case for your projects and justify your budgetary needs.
Throughout this course, we will discuss what comprises Risk (assets, threats, and vulnerabilities), providing numerous real-world examples along the way. We will also cover Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Measurements, showing how you can calculate the risk of an uncertainty due to vulnerabilities and threats.
This course also includes two case studies of what happens when risk management fails, as demonstrated by the Amazon Web Services outage and Equifax data breach that both occurred in 2017. You will learn to better understand these scenarios, what caused the outage/breach, and why managers may have made the decisions they did that led up to them.
Upon completion of this course, you will earn 3 CEUs towards the renewal of your CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, Linux+, Cloud+, PenTest+, CySA+, or CASP+ certifications.
Introduction
This video contains a short introduction from your instructor, Jason.
This lesson includes the downloadable study guide as a resource for your offline studies and note taking.
What is Risk?
In this lecture, we will discuss the three major components of risk: assets, vulnerabilities, and threats.
In this lecture, you will learn the different types of risk that exist in the business world and in our IT networks.
In this lesson, we will discuss the different types of threats that our networks and businesses face.
In this lecture, we will breakdown what happens when Risk Management fails by examining the Amazon Web Services outage from 2017 that took down nearly the entire East Coast region!
What Can You Do With Risk?
In this video, we will introduce the concepts of mitigating, transferring, avoiding, and accepting risk.
In this video, we will dive deeper into the concept of Risk Mitigation.
In this video, we will dive deeper into the concept of Risk Transference.
In this video, we will dive deeper into the concept of Risk Avoidance.
In this video, we will dive deeper into the concept of Risk Acceptance.
In this video, we will discuss how risk controls are selected.
In this lesson, we will take a small detour into the world of project management (PMP and PRINCE2) to discuss additional risk responses that are available beyond the four basics we discussed above.
Calculating Risk
In this lesson, you will learn the different types of ways to calculate risk.
In this video, we will discuss the qualitative risk measurement methods.
In this video, we will discuss the quantitative risk measurement methods.
In this video, we will discuss the Equifax data breach of July 2017, what led up to it, and the management decisions that could have prevented it.
Risk Management in the Real World
In this short video, students will receive an introduction to this section of interviews with industry professionals in the Government, Defense, Commercial, and Health Care sectors and how they implement Risk Management in the Real World.
In this video, Jason interviews Mr. Randy Fuller who worked in the Government sector. Mr. Fuller's organization spans across 6 continents and hundreds of thousands of users.
In this video, Jason interviews Mr. Corey Charles who works as an IT Manager in the Vulnerability Management space in the Government sector. Mr. Charles' organization spans across 6 states and thousands of users.
In this video, Jason interviews Mr. David Anderson, the Director of Information Security Operations for a major health care provider in the United States. His organization spans 46 hospitals across numerous states, and gives us a unique inside look at how decisions made decades ago can still affect the risk posture of our networks today. (The audio quality is not the greatest, unfortunately, as we had to record it over a phone line connection, but it is well worth listening to because the discussion he provides us is outstanding!)
In this interview, we talk with Tu Laniyonu who works in the Government Sector as a digital forensic examiner working on cases of suspected insider threats.
Conclusion
In this video, we will provide a short conclusion and summary of the course.
