It is 2021. What does a community do when it receives a Department of Defense grant for $1.3 million dollars to create a cybersecurity hub? You engage the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) to manage the grant and hire the top cybersecurity professional in the country, Angel Kern, to develop a comprehensive cybersecurity program at the Technical College of the Lowcountry (TCL). Then, to create this Lowcountry cybersecurity ecosystem, you add the Beaufort Digital Corridor, South Coast Cyber Center, the Beaufort Economic Development Corporation, Beaufort County Schools, the private sector, and local nonprofits.
Angel Kern hit the ground running as TCL’s Cybersecurity Program Director in January of 2022 and hasn’t looked back. She is a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) with more than thirty-five years of technology and security/risk management experience. She was VP of IT at two regional community banks and has been teaching networking and security for 18 years at both the high school and college level. She has developed and taught cybersecurity courses for Harrisburg University, Penn State University and now TCL. Kern holds an M.B.A. from York College of PA and a M.Ed. from Penn State.
When asked, what is cybersecurity? Kern answered, “Cybersecurity is nothing more than risk management. For years we’ve been doing financial risk management, protecting those assets, managing liabilities which is the same thing we’re doing in cybersecurity. We are protecting assets, but now it’s IT assets, hardware, software, data, people, facilities, equipment. We must figure out what are the threats to those assets so that we can put controls in place to lower the risk of losing those assets. We are finally realizing that to be cyber secure, we need to be detecting, responding and recovering from intrusions, breaches, and attacks. These threats must be addressed quickly to protect national security and our critical infrastructures.”
The need for cybersecurity professionals is immense with over 700,000 open positions just in the United States, 1.3 million worldwide, with salaries beginning at over $70,000. The field is growing by 32% per year – faster than any other profession. A cybersecurity job is quite different than your typical IT position. It involves protecting computer systems, networks, and data from unauthorized access, breaches, attacks, and other security threats.
“We are not training people fast enough. We have to get more innovative and basically pull people from other career fields into cybersecurity. I always tell people there’s a technical and non-technical side to cyber. You don’t have to be just a technical computer nerd, but you must be a problem solver, curious and detail oriented. We don’t need a lot of rocket scientists; we need practical program managers and risk managers and executives who understand what is at stake.” said Kern.
For several years, the Technical College of the Lowcountry has had a cybersecurity certificate; however, when Angel Kern was hired two and half years ago, she proposed a new associate’s degree.
“Instead of trying to use CPT, Computer Technology prefixed courses, or IST, Information Science Technology prefixed courses, I proposed the new prefix CYB for cybersecurity, which created a whole new sequence of courses. Several other colleges were not happy with me because we now had three different IT related degrees with overlapping courses. I’m working on a committee right now to eliminate the overlap,” said Kern.
It took a year for Kern to get all the approvals for the new degree from first the TCL curriculum committee, then the SC Technical College System, and then the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, a regional accreditation body. She designed all the course materials, content, selected all the books, all the labs and selected all the instructors. There are now 110 students enrolled in the TCL program with 8 graduating this past May, headed to high paying jobs.
“Both USCB and TCL are now working to gain their National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security Center of Academic Excellence status, which is very prestigious and will be a huge incentive for employers. This accreditation will qualify for us even more grants. Our students will be in position for full scholarships and then possibly work for NSA or the Department of Defense. We are also in the process of writing a $200 million, five-year National Science Foundation grant to help build our cybersecurity ecosystem here,” said Kern.
Kern says TCL and USCB are charged with building the training system, educating the population, and working with community and business and industry to bring up the cyber security awareness level to the Lowcountry. Growing these programs is another incentive for aerospace and defense companies in Beaufort County.
“What impressed me is that SC Governor Henry McMaster is extremely interested in what we are doing down here. We have a lot of great leadership with Warren Parker with the South Coast Cyber Center, the leadership at USC, and at the BCEDC. We can and will make our region a cybersecurity training hub,” she said.
As far as Kern’s next step, she will be retiring as the TCL program director at the end of December but now has a new plan. She and another colleague are working to develop real-time online content and virtual laboratories for cybersecurity. There are many colleges after her to create a cybersecurity degree for them.
“We want to figure out how to replicate ourselves, so we are creating a new startup named Ed-Ready.com. We are in the process of securing grant funding to create and deliver free cyber security awareness training for colleges and other organizations struggling to train and equip their people with cyber skills needed in the twenty-first century,” she said.
While working on this project, Angel Kern will continue to teach cybersecurity courses for TCL remotely.
