TekStream Whole of State Cybersecurity Program Featuring Student-Led SOC
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TekStream Whole of State Cybersecurity Program Featuring Student-Led SOC
Additional Info
| Job title of nominated professional (or team name) | TekStream Enterprise Security Team |
| Company (where nominated professional or team is working) | TekStream |
| Website | https://www.tekstream.com/ |
| Company size (employees) | 100 to 499 |
| Country | United States |
| Headquarters Region | North America |
Overview
One of the most critical business sectors, the cybersecurity industry faces a severe workforce crisis, with more than 600,000 unfilled positions in the U.S. To address the talent shortage, TekStream, in partnership with Louisiana State University (LSU), Splunk and AWS, developed a student-powered Security Operations Center (SOC) that leverages a whole-of-state approach. Launched in 2023, the SOC offers 24/7 security coverage across 34 institutions while providing students with up to 1,000 hours of frontline security experience each year, regardless of their major.
The TekStream team that leads the first-of-its-kind, student-run SOC creates a diverse workforce with students from non-security backgrounds and launches them into a ripe market with wide workforce placement gaps. This team consists of Bruce Johnson, Senior Director, Enterprise Security; Biplab Panda, Director, Engagement; and Michael Fazely, Manager, Security Operations Center.
Under their leadership, students in the LSU SOC receive career counseling and guidance in the context of their program performance to help guide them toward the cybersecurity discipline best for their skills and aptitudes. Participating students take Splunk Academic Alliance courses and are trained in TekStream playbooks built on Splunk SOAR as actual employees. These playbooks are guides for various use cases that specify what evidence they need to collect to remediate a cyber threat. Alongside TekStream, students can investigate 22 different types of detections. Since early 2024, students have worked on approximately 33% of all SOC cybersecurity incidents.
To date, under this team’s leadership, the LSU student-run SOC has a 100 percent job placement upon graduation rate.
Accomplishments
• TekStream’s whole-of-state solution is unique to the marketplace, as it focuses on one of the primary challenges in cybersecurity: a lack of qualified security professionals to meet the needs of today’s businesses. In partnership with LSU, AWS and Splunk, the student-run SOC is the first known SOC to follow a co-managed model.
• Under the team’s leadership, the program follows a just-in-time training approach with a formalized maturity model, evaluation phase, and testing stage to bring students along at their own pace incrementally. Using this approach, students are trained at the same level as TekStream employees on cyberattacks, analysis, network defense, policy and escalation and real-time response tactics to actual incidents. They gain valuable experience in professional roles that are in high demand. This serves as an excellent opportunity to take a lower-cost approach to training new talent and upskilling current IT staff that addresses labor shortages that are driving up labor costs in both the public and private sectors.
• The training program this team developed as part of the SOC provides ongoing, consistent monitoring of operational metrics and oversight to ensure optimal incident response for the institutions receiving coverage from the SOC.
