Facing rising cyber threats and a nationwide talent shortage, the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has partnered with the cybersecurity company TekStream to launch a student-run Security Operations Center (SOC).
The SOC will double as both a money-saving security apparatus for the university and a workforce development initiative, giving students access to security technology from the software company Splunk, as well as hands-on experience in a real-world SOC environment, according to a news release this week.
With a student population of over 13,000 and a campus workforce of more than 2,000, NJIT sought a partner to meet the challenge of managing cybersecurity with limited resources. The news release said running an SOC entirely in-house with students wouldn’t have been feasible, due to what is required of analysts and the impracticality of relying on students to manage around-the-clock operations.
“When do you ever come across a company that says, ‘you hire your students, we’ll train them and also take on the liability of protecting you’?” NJIT’s CISO Sharon Kelley said in a public statement. “For TekStream to work with us on this dual-purpose solution, serving the needs of enterprises shoring up their cybersecurity systems while also training a new class of industry professionals is a brilliant way to tackle the growing need for skilled cybersecurity talent.”
In 2023, the National Institute of Standards and Technology put the global cybersecurity workforce shortage at 3.4 million, making partnerships of this kind increasingly useful to higher-ed institutions as well as to private- and public-sector employers.
Bruce Johnson, senior director of enterprise security at TekStream, called the collaboration “a unique opportunity to help students start developing their cybersecurity career before they even graduate,” and emphasized the model’s scalability for other institutions.
This is TekStream’s second such initiative, following a similar collaboration with Louisiana State University that included partners Splunk and AWS.
“The truth of the matter is, our industry is facing a massive problem when it comes to the growing need for new, experienced cybersecurity talent,” Kelley said in a public statement. “It’s on us to help scale programs that support tomorrow’s cybersecurity workforce so that, as a whole, we can be better equipped to handle growing cybersecurity challenges.”
Editor’s note: This story was developed in collaboration with GPT-4 and reviewed and edited by CDE Editorial staff.
