Cyber Skills Award Winner: Systems Architecture Security, Dean Mitchell
07 Jan, 2025
Min read
The Munster Technological University Faculty of Engineering & Science Awards recognise and celebrate students who have shown academic excellence throughout the year. This year, Cyber Skills honours four students who excelled in their chosen pathway.
One of those four students is Dean Mitchell who shares his experience of studying Systems Architecture Security with Cyber Skills and the value of the pathway to him both personally and professionally.
"I started with Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a regular Level 1 technical support.
At this time, i am an Infrastructure Engineer supporting Cyber Security applications and process.
I've been in this role for over 7 years now.
My company regularly encourages and helps employees to expand knowledge through various service and methods.
Ordinarily, i would not be able to avail of these learning opportunities, due to workload and family life responsibilities.
The once a week evening time courses, along with self paced learning offered allowed me to benefit from these online courses.
This course allowed me to visualize and verbalize the services i support from an infrastructure security standpoint rather than the usual service flow or operations support viewpoint.
Some key examples:
Understanding why a certain cryptographic protocol is 'better' than another in specific use cases and why protocols become obsolete.
Choosing which security standards to follow and breadown of the sections to help focus on each area when needed.
Designing and planning the security diagram and security strategy for a theoretical cloud based service.
When reviewing new services to be supported or developed, the knowledge gained will help me highlight gaps in the security design, along with the ability to explain why the gap exists
I would advise anyone looking to apply to a course, to check in on the timing and scheduling, it could surprise you with how accessible these courses can be, even to people with a loaded schedule."
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