Risk Management for Cybersecurity and IT Managers

The management's guide to understanding Risk Management decisions in cybersecurity and information technology (IT)

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.