As new technologies are developed and cyber threats mount, information assurance engineers work in increasingly dynamic and challenging environments. The skills and knowledge of these information security professionals help keep data uncompromised and allow organizations to run smoothly.
What Does an Information Assurance Engineer Do?
Information assurance engineers function in a team of security specialists who protect an organization’s data. They design security systems that ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of data. This means the system must keep private information out of unauthorized hands, safeguard it from improper modifications or destruction, and make it available to authorized users in a timely and dependable way. The primary focus of information assurance engineers is guaranteeing the security, quality, and retrievability of this data. Here is a breakdown of what information assurance engineers do to maximize the security of their organization’s IT systems.
Secure IT Infrastructure
Information assurance engineers perform many tasks to secure an organization’s technology infrastructure and information. They install firewalls, data encryption software, and anti-virus protections. They also conduct audits that can account for compliance lapses in security policies. These audits enable them to measure a system’s security and assess the effectiveness of individual security policies.
Penetration tests provide further insights on the actions that a company should take to keep its network safe. These simulated cyber attacks help identify vulnerabilities and locate issues that could make systems susceptible to breaches.
Keep Software and Hardware Up to Date
Another important responsibility of information assurance engineers is maintaining software and the hardware it runs on. Information assurance engineers must keep up-to-date on IT news to stay abreast of evolving security threats and trends. Because technology is constantly changing, new security threats arise frequently. Possessing current information helps information assurance engineers to make appropriate updates and patches to their systems.
Set Security Standards
Safeguarding information requires all of an organization’s members to behave in accordance with certain standards and best practices. Information assurance engineers often establish what those standards and best practices should be and communicate them to leadership. They might also be responsible for creating instructional material on their recommended security awareness policies and monitoring adherence to those policies.
Monitoring Threats
Information assurance engineers work with a variety of tools that can alert them to vulnerabilities or breaches. IDS and IPS — intrusion detection and prevention systems — alert them to malicious activities or the violation of security policies. Reviewing a network’s activities through event log analysis allows information assurance engineers to track network anomalies, system downtime, or events that do not follow industry standards. Such data makes it possible to locate patterns that expose weaknesses in a system’s security.
When security breaches occur, information assurance engineers must resolve them as quickly as possible by patching their systems and taking action to mitigate the damage. After a security incident, information assurance engineers analyze how the system was breached and then prepare reports that assess the damage. Based on their findings, they adjust their systems and update procedures to detect and respond to future threats.
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