For some reason I really can’t fathom right now, I seem to be channeling my grade school (or middle school) history lessons, because the slogan – and not the rather more electrically interpreted song from They Might Be Giants – “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” popped into my head the other day, and it just won’t leave…
In case your American history’s a bit rusty, it’s originally a political campaign song from the 1840 presidential election—and a time when it was the Whigs vs. the Democrats instead of the dueling political parties of today’s headlines. History tells us – as well as the fact it has a modern Wikipedia page – that both it worked, and it was noteworthy as the birth of campaign songs as marketing devices.
So when someone asked me recently how they could possibly start the Building Effective Security Architectures course that takes 5-10 hours a week and runs for 7 weeks concurrently with attending this year’s RSA conference in San Francisco since they both basically start at the same time…
…my reply was “RSA and BESA too? Of course you can.”
Because like everything, it’s about priorities—not to mention the happy happenstance that the kick-off week (the Foundations module) of the course is the lightest of the lot. There’s only 4 lessons, and it’s about an hour or so, and you have the whole week to do the initial level-setting exercise.
Now, I know conferences can be hectic, so maybe this isn’t quite the best idea for you depending on your particular attendance objectives should you happen to be headed to RSA this year. But, I did want to touch on this point briefly since it’s come up a few times in case it seems to be a show-stopper for you.
The challenge with running a 7 week, interactive and intensive course is actually partially the logistics. There’s always some kind of conflict. Funnily enough, that makes it a lot like architecture, because the essence of building effective architectures is being able to identify and resolve those kind of critical, potentially show-stopping conflicts in a way that not only helps “win the day” for the organizations you protect…
…but still keeps you sporting as much – or as little – hair on your cybersecurity head as you care to do.
And, it’s the only way shy of spending at least 5x more that you can learn in a live environment the full, end-to-end approach of applying The Agile Security System™ to build aligned, actionable, relevant and…
…dare I say, valuable…
…security architectures using the SABSA® methodology that can dramatically change the way your organization thinks about…and does…cybersecurity from top to bottom.
But maybe that’s not interesting to you, or maybe it’s too early in the year to allocate your training budget…
…or maybe you’d rather spend the money to go to RSA.
The best part?
Whatever decision you make is gonna be the right decision for you – right now – in your situation and your organization, because only you know what’s really going on…or what’s really a priority.
If you’d like to join us – with or without the background soundtrack of RSA on the 24th of February – the link to sign up is right over here:
If not, don’t. It’s all good either way.
Stay safe,
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Archistry Chief Executive
