A year after launching its specialized student-powered Security Operations Center (SOC), Florida Polytechnic University is seeing its hands-on education deliver remarkable results as students step into competitive industry roles and the program evolves into a proven training ground for emerging cybersecurity professionals.
The SOC, established in partnership with Lakeland-based cybersecurity leader Sittadel, provides students with essential hands-on workforce experience. Students proactively defend Florida Poly from real-time digital threats while gaining advanced cybersecurity skills to excel in similar industry roles.
“By trusting our students to actively defend our digital campus infrastructure, we are simultaneously hardening our institutional security and creating a strong talent pipeline for the high-tech workforce,” said Cole Allen, the University’s vice president of information technology services and CIO.
Over the past 12 months, the SOC has grown a promising program into a high-performance training ground.
“We originally set out to provide applied learning that moves at the incredibly fast pace of the cybersecurity industry,” said Garrett Poorbaugh, COO and security architect at Sittadel. “For example, not even a month ago, a new feature launched in the security tool that we use, and we’re already figuring out how to get them trained and operationalized in it.”
By using the SOC operating model developed by Florida Poly and Sittadel, students triage and investigate real security alerts across email, identity, endpoint and cloud environments, documenting their findings and working as a team to neutralize threats.
“The objective and scope have changed to include research and working with third-party clients partnered up with the University,” said Josh Morales, a cybersecurity engineering junior beginning his second year at the SOC. “Our tasks have gone from the small scope of email and user accounts to protecting the University at large.”
The program’s success is already reflected in its alumni. Its first two graduates quickly leveraged their resume-boosting SOC experience into competitive roles within the industry, Poorbaugh said.
“If I’m the employer and I see on their resume that a SOC student did so well on the classes for his cybersecurity degree from Florida Poly, worked in a SOC for almost a year, and had an internship with a company where they developed a penetration test, they’re blowing every other candidate out of the water,” said Poorbaugh, who serves as Sittadel’s SOC presence and lead on new development in the program.
In his role, Poorbaugh works to provide students with this up-to-the-minute, real-world, professional-level training and experience.
Just one year after opening, the Florida Poly-Sittadel SOC model has proven so successful that it is expanding beyond the Lakeland campus. Although the expansions have yet to launch, Poorbaugh said other universities in the state are now partnering with the program to bring their own SOCs online, establishing a growing network of collaborative student analysts.
On campus, the program maintains a tight-knit, supportive environment where experienced students mentor newcomers.
“Coming in, I didn’t know entirely what I was getting into,” said cybersecurity engineering junior Colton Hewell, who joined the SOC last year. “But it’s been a really great way to learn what a SOC analyst does on a day-to-day basis and get hands-on experience in cloud platforms.”
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Contact:
Lydia Guzmán
Director of Communications
863-874-8557
