Starting New Info Sec Analyst Role - Questions about plan going forward

securitybro

Hey all,

This is my first post, but I have been using these forums for awhile and it's great there is an awesome community of professionals when it comes to this stuff.

I recently separated from the Army and after interviewing from a ton of stuff I decided on taking a role here locally where I am in WA state. I have experience with the way the Army's "Information Assurance" but obviously in the private sector it's little different.

I have a good fundamental understanding of security principles, procedures, processes, but some of the systems ie: IDS, IPS, firewall configurations I'm not quite up to speed on since I didn't have much access to that while I was in the Army.

I know it will probably take me a few weeks to get an idea of the systems are ran at the new job, but I wanted to see if anyone has some experience on how they started their first Info Sec role out and what they were hoping to accomplish and get done.

I really like the SANS white sheets and I stumbled onto an oldie, but still relevant that I think gives me an idea of where to start as a baseline then work my way up.

http://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/modeling/network-security-model-32843

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm looking forward to my first civilian job and the very generous bump in salary

Thanks!

Danielm7

Best bet would be first defining what you consider to be your ultimate goal. From there you can make a plan. Lots of people start out as analysts, and love the role and hope to one day be a Sr level or a manager of a SOC. Some want to be pen testers, some want to be security engineers / blue team, etc. So many different directions to go, try to narrow down what interests you at some point then you can make a plan to get there.