I am pretty excited to share here this significant milestone in my career: I achieved Certified Chief Information Security Officer (CCISO) certification from EC-Council! 🎓
Why significant? Because it reflects the end of a cycle I initiated back in 2010.
Back then I was a student in one of French top IT-specialized engineer, exploring tons of diverse fields but mostly growing deep understanding of software (be it how to develop them or how they run on their underlying infrastructure). I was the presented with a choice: continue in Software development field or chose something else. I chose the latter with Information Security.
Boy the journey has been an interesting but bumpy one. The interesting part is pretty obvious for any curious person: lots of knowledge to grasp and implement (hence my previous certifications be it CISA, CISSP or PCIP). The bumpy part might be more difficult to understand for non IT persons. Starting as an IT engineer, working on Information security field (especially in the blue team 🔵) requires a mindset shift from implementing features/capabilities to understand your organization runs (most likely how/when/where revenue is being generated) then explain why/how this Business Plan can be challenged (be it by adversary parties or ‘simple’ clumsiness/Hardware malfunction). The explaining part is already presenting its own difficulties to overcome (especially when IT/tech Jargon is sort of your native speech 🤐) but the real challenge comes after: growing (even a little, baby steps are key here) influence into business decisions. This is where certification such as CCISO shines. It involves advanced Information Security concepts, sure. But it leans as well into management and business aspects (structuring a business case, hiring/nurturing a team, understanding key finance/accounting concepts to build/defend budgets and much more), that – to me – are an absolute must for CISO to master should their aim be to thrive in their job and – most certainly more importantly – to protect their hiring organization.
This certification allowed me to confirm my assumptions that to further my professional aspirations, I need to stop seeing myself solely as a senior engineer hence completing my posture with stronger and growing business acumen. I may not be ambitious enough to attempt to pin to my curriculum a MBA next but things will definitely look into this direction moving forward, stay tuned as more is bound to come.
Last but certainly not least (this should come as no surprise to anyone readying these few lines while knowing me either personally, professionally or both): Being a firm believer in life being a sequence of chances you transform into opportunities I would like to express my gratitude 🙏 to people who provided with such chances. Attempting to compile an complete grateful list would be a perilous endeavor, most likely bound to be unsuccessful since this list would be pretty extensive, and I don’t think I would be capable of not forgetting at least one of two significant contributions. As such I would restrain this public list to the following four categories: my family (be it my parents, my sister, my dear wife Amélie and my two adorable kids), my Uni managers (Sébastien, Claudine, Joël, Eva), my certifications endorsers (Guillaume, Pierre-Alexandre, Camille and Baptiste) and my hiring managers (Vincent, Anna, Michael, Cyril and Stéphane). That being said please consider that if you read those few words, chances are high that you belong to this list as well so… Thank you! 👍
PS: I have been due to share this update here for quite some time (circa one year 😧), time sure flies when both home and work get busy. 🐝
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