IT security education continues to evolve

Previously appeared November 17, 2008

Posted by Dr. Gene Spafford

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Security&articleId=9120622&taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=2

November 17, 2008 (CSO) The majority of programs at colleges and universities around the country are certainly doing a good job of training people to go into positions in IT. In fact, we have a greater demand among employers for students than we have students to fill positions. That said, there are some areas where we lack students who graduate with the right amount of expertise and focus. IT security and cyber forensics are areas where we have a critical need for workers in the field.

Computer science has been undergoing a transition over the last few years in academia. We've gone from teaching fundamentals for construction and systems to focusing more on all the places where computing can make a difference. The transition has been more to concepts at higher levels, with languages and graphics and network computation, than we saw five years ago. Before, computer science was focused more on program solutions around individual host computers and only some distributed computation. Now we are seeing more and more with large scale networks, cloud computing,Google apps, just to name a few. The field is shifting in that direction.

The security implications of these things are not known, or are being dismissed. The companies pushing these solutions are more interested in the business case than in the possible negatives. For instance, there are some interesting issues related to privacy of information that is stored and calculated remotely -- companies that have access to that data may be able to use it in marketing, which means more profit for them. They aren't motivated to find new ways to protect it.