• Online, Self-Paced
  • Classroom
Course Description

This completely updated course is designed to empower advancing managers who want to get up to speed quickly on information security issues and terminology. You won't just learn about security, you will learn how to manage security. Lecture sections are intense; the most common student comment is that it's like drinking from a fire hose. The diligent manager will gain vital, up-to-date knowledge and skills required to supervise the security component of any information technology project. Additionally, the course has been engineered to incorporate the NIST Special Publication 800 (series) guidance so that it can be particularly useful to US government managers and supporting contractors.

Essential security topics covered in this management track include: network fundamentals and applications, power, cooling and safety, architectural approaches to defense in depth, cyber attacks, vulnerability assessment and management, security policies, contingency and continuity planning, awareness management, risk management analysis, incident handling, Web application security, offensive and defensive information warfare, culminating with our management practicum. The material uses Knowledge Compression™, special charts, and other proprietary SANS techniques to help convey the key points of critical slides and keep the information flow rate at a pace senior executives demand every teaching hour of the course. The course has been evaluated and approved by CompTIA's CAQC program for Security + 2008 to ensure that managers and their direct reports have a common baseline for security terminology and concepts. You will be able to put what you learn into practice the day you get back into the office.

Learning Objectives

  • Establish a minimum standard for IT security knowledge, skills, and abilities. In a nutshell, this course covers all of the non-operating system topics that are in SANS Security Essentials, though not to the same depth. The goal is to enable managers and auditors to speak the same language as system, security, and network administrators.
  • Establish a minimum standard for IT management knowledge, skills and abilities. I keep running into managers that do not know TCP/IP, and that is okay; but then they do not know how to calculate total cost of ownership (TCO), leaving me quietly wondering what they do know.
  • Save the up-and-coming generation of senior and rapidly advancing managers a world of pain by sharing the things we wish someone had shared with us. As the saying goes, it is okay to make mistakes, just make new ones.

Framework Connections