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It’s been nearly a year since the ribbon was cut on LSU’s student-run Security Operations Center, a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership that aims to protect Louisiana’s higher education institutions while also training the next generation of the cybersecurity workforce.
So, what has the center’s first year looked like?
According to LSU Chief Information Officer Craig Woolley, the SOC—pronounced like “sock”—has been “extremely successful” thus far.
“The students are performing in the way that we had hoped,” Woolley tells Daily Report. “They’re contributing to the mission of the SOC in big ways.”
For those unfamiliar, a SOC is a facility designed to detect cyber threats coming into an organization—in this case, Louisiana’s higher education institutions. SOC employees actively monitor systems for anomalies that might signal an attack.
What makes LSU’s SOC unique is the fact that it was born out of a partnership between the state and two private companies—Splunk and TekStream. Splunk provides analytic and monitoring technologies while TekStream supports incident response and facility management. Students employed at the SOC receive continuous and ever-evolving training and work alongside TekStream’s cybersecurity professionals to identify and thwart potential threats.
“We’re giving our students great experience for when they graduate and we’re keeping our schools safe,” Woolley says. “It’s a win-win.”
Eighteen schools are currently being monitored through the SOC, and Woolley’s goal is to have all 38 of Louisiana’s public higher education institutions onboarded by June of next year. Two additional student-run SOCs are set to go online this fall in support of that effort—one at LSU’s Shreveport campus and one at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston.
Sixteen students across multiple disciplines are currently employed at the Baton Rouge SOC and seven more will be hired in the fall to bring the total to 23. That number will continue to climb as more schools are onboarded—Woolley says about 50 students will be employed there once all is said and done.
“The hope is that once all 38 institutions are onboarded, we’ll be more proactive than reactive,” Woolley says. “This doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be attacks, but being able to identify threats early will definitely put us in a better position than we were in when there was nobody watching.”
The Louisiana Legislature in 2023 allocated $7.5 million in recurring funding to the program. Officials have stated that enabling schools to protect themselves and share resources will only serve to save the state money in the long run.
The program is part of a broader push by LSU to become a national leader in cybersecurity at a time when the industry is facing a glaring workforce shortage. Today, there are nearly 600,000 unfilled cybersecurity roles in the U.S. and almost 3.5 million open positions globally. Read more about the university’s efforts here.
