Technical Executive Summary - computer security

Assignment Background:

You have been recently hired as a Security Engineer by the CSO of a mid-size regional special metals company. They have developed an innovative method of producing seamless, stainless steel tubing for the booming natural gas industry.

The company size and IT infrastructure has grown quickly. The senior management team understands that their proprietary technologies need to be protected from competitors as well as numerous foreign nation states.

Recently, they hired a third party penetration testing security firm to conduct a security audit of their IT infrastructure. The resulting recommendations showed that additional security infrastructure investments were required to lower the risk level of the organization.

Sufficient budgeting to accomplish these goals and reduce their risk exposure was approved by the senior management team. Therefore, the CSO is in the process of evaluating specific new technologies that could prove beneficial to protecting the IT infrastructure and assets of the organization.

The CSO recently attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA, and returned with business cards of the following companies that she had seen product demos for.

She needs your help in sorting out what products are the most relevant.

Assignment Specific Tasks and Deliverables:

1. Identify the the security product vendors listed above specifically assigned to you

2. Review the security product(s) available from the vendor, and choose a single product

that you feel would likely be useful for your organization

3. Create a one page only “Technical Executive Summary” document that contains and identifies in separate sections All of these four items:

a. General vendor overview summary

b. Overview summary of the specific security product you have chosen

c. Technical summary of how the product functions

d. Your recommendation as to why the security technology would help lower the risk exposure of your company and is worth the investment.

4. If you would like to submit a draft to me in advance, please feel free. I can review it and provide feedback. Although, please plan ahead and try to get a draft submitted sooner than later so that I have enough time to review it before the due date.

Tips of writing a Technical Executive Summary document

· Use bullet points as item summaries, not long paragraphs/sentences.

· The summary should be written so that any reader, regardless of their technical knowledge , should be able to understand the findings and recommendations.

· Please view formats of other technical executive summaries found on the web. These are structured in brief, concise sections with headers, and often use bulleted items.

· Make the document look professional, as it will be submitted to your CSO.

· Given that this is only one page , do not include any visuals beyond possibly a company logo.

What not to do:

· Long exhaustive, verbose paragraphs are not a good idea and are strongly discouraged.

· Using small fonts to fit more text is highly discouraged.

How to Get a score of “zero” on this assignment:

· Submit an executive summary that is longer than one page.

· Choose a product vendor that was not assigned to you in the above table.