DETROIT – Ask Emily Campbell, Information Technology Chair for ITT Technical Institute in Canton, and she will tell you the way to safeguard your career is to get into a line of business that can?t be off-shored – like security. Specifically government security.
In the business world, horror stories already abound of companies in various industry sectors that have recently come under compliance requirements with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA but were off-shoring aspects of their IT operations and got severely bitten as a result. There?s been more than one case of disgruntled subcontractors that were not paid by their parent off-shore company that surprised the U.S. company which had contracted for offshore information entry by holding their data for ransom. While you can learn all about the best methods of taking your business off shore and reducing the risk of security breaches, one customer that isn?t likely to entertain even the remotest possibility of that is good ol? Uncle Sam.
The government is currently promoting IA educational standards that it uses to guide many of the security related internal hires for various government agencies. Still in development phase is a new maturity model, not the familiar Capability Maturity Model (CMM), but a new Information Assurance Maturity Model (IAMM) which will further the IA standard from the educational community into the practicing world. As it turns out, we have some local talent that is working on this new standard, and they are open to sharing their information as they develop it through a newly formed association for our region.
If you have an interest in furthering your existing career in Information Assurance or would like to explore a shift in your career into this field, the Information Assurance Professionals Association is just your ticket. Current board president Dan Cohen of General Motors, Vice President Emily Campbell of ITT Tech, Jim Hedges of ITT and Jill Denizen of EDS round out the officers of the newly formed club. They have a website that can provide additional information ? www.iapa-glc.org. They typically have their meetings the 3rd Saturday of each month.
Dan Shoemaker, head of University of Detroit?s IA program is working with the association on the development of not only the IAMM, but will follow it with an audit document that can be used to measure compliance for companies that wish to be certified.
According to Emily, the new association is at an exciting time, where small member numbers allow all members to get involved in a variety of the program activities, including quarterly presentations to promote the Information Assurance career path and to stress including the education in more school curriculums. The association hopes its members will become a pool of consulting experts that will be available to help audit companies that wish to attain the IAMM certification so they are able to apply for Department of Defense and other government agency work in the future.
Hans Erickson is a member of the Eastern Michigan chapter of InfraGard and the CIO at the Detroit Regional Chamber.
