After completing this course, I have a new found respect for security as an interdependent collection that spans the entirety of the network, identity, and security stack. The relationship between fundamental concepts in this course such as ICAM, PKI, and incident response define how the CIA triad us upheld. Ensuring these technical concepts are defined and governed through risk assessment and management frameworks bridges the gap between minor vulnerability mitigation and high level operational resilience.

Growth and Development

I grew most substantially with regard to my holistic understanding of network architecture as opposed to how I typically viewed networks, with focus only on the area in which I had expertise. Understanding how seemingly minor vulnerabilities can be chained together across operational domains to enable lateral and vertical movement through a network outlines the need to not only understand all facets of the network to some degree, but also ensure cross-department collaboration and information sharing. Additionally, I had previously seen implementing security controls as a box to check, but now I look to see how effectively the control actually mitigates or contains a breach, and how these controls interact with one another to achieve critical operational objectives.

Challenges Overcome

The biggest challenge I encountered in this course was understanding and synthesizing risk management and governance with my technical knowledge. There is a chasm between creating a policy, and using that policy to implement a technical control that I have always struggled to grasp. Through the framing of cybersecurity as a comprehensive and complex ecosystem I was able to better understand that in order to appropriately secure a network, the policy makers, policy enforcers, and technical teams need to understand their dependence on and relation to one another.

Applying Knowledge Gained Professionally

As an engineer, my focus has always been on implementing technical controls to solve clear problems. Having the opportunity to see things from a different perspective allowed me to view current challenges at my job as more easily addressed, and made me question solutions already implemented. The knowledge gained from the hands on labs will be especially useful from a technical perspective, as there were many techniques for managing Windows and Linux machines that I was not aware of. Overall, the lessons learned will help me significantly to better translate technical vulnerabilities into quantifiable operational risks.