Now, what will we be covering in this learning path? Well, obviously operating systems. Because what you find out, is when it comes to cybersecurity, it really is just a combination of how we're trying to secure the systems, the networks, and the data that we utilize to compute and do our day-to-day things. When you look at it from the perspective of how we look at it, you're either storing your data, or you're moving your data from one place to another, or you're computing or processing that data. When you store that data, you use hard drives, which is generally an extension of a piece of hardware that's connected to an operating system. When you process your data, you're using a computer's RAM and memory to do that, which is part of, yet again, an operating system. When you're moving your data from one place to the other, you're using your internal network, or you're using the Internet, or some other medium, but all of that happens over what we call a network. It's a digital network that's used to move your data from one place to the other. When you're doing either of those things, we have to come up with ways to secure that, and that's some of the foundations of what cybersecurity is. There's always also network and security foundations that we'll be looking at. Again, in order for you to understand how to secure these things, you need at least a very fundamental understanding of how these things work. If I asked you to secure my car as it goes from one place to another, and I didn't tell you what that place was, or how the car is going to get there, you'd have a hard time securing it. We're going to look at some specifics of that. Also policies, procedures, frameworks, and foundations, we're going to be looking at, how do we make sure we're doing those things? Once we figure out this is what we need to do to secure it, how do we ensure that those things are happening? How do we know that we're doing it the right way? How do we make sure that others that come after us will know how to do these things? Those things are called policies, procedures, and frameworks. The frameworks give us what we generally need to build policies and procedures. Policies govern how we should do things, and procedures are almost like step-by-steps of how to be in compliance with that policy for example, and that's a very high-level elementary definition of it, but that's basically what it is. Cybersecurity audit. We're definitely going to spend some time looking at that because that's another control piece that basically describes how we're going to be doing these things. Then of course, risk management. Everything that we talk about in cybersecurity can be tied back to risk, because if there's no risk of something happening, then why would we spend money to prevent it? When we look at these cybersecurity risk and we look at the things that are happening in the industry, some of the things that make the news may not apply to every organization in the world. How do you find out what your risk or your exposure is to that hacker, to that threat actor, or to that data breach, how do you find it out? Well, we do that in risk management. That's what risk management people spend most of their time doing, and we'll give you a behind the curtains look at what that is as well, to really make sure that you understand how all these pieces work together, and more importantly, you come away knowing that no single piece is really more important than the other. All the pieces that make up what we call cybersecurity are very important.
