This will be the last blog entry I make on the project. I’ve finalised the final report and have recorded the presentation.

Using the blog entries, I’ve created the entries in a tabled format too for ease of reading.

I’m amazed that I completed the work on time and all things considered, pretty much spot on to my project plan. Especially noting the week delay I had due to work and family issues.

In preparing the presentation I found that PowerPoint natively enables recording video as an overlay on the presentation. Have to enable the Recording toolbar, but it works pretty well. The only difficulty I had was this method of recording video doesn’t provide the typical presenter notes. To overcome this, and to be fair resulting in a better outcome, I was able to make my phone into a teleprompter.

This subject has been an incredible journey both as a means to research, but in learning delivery techniques. I could have done without the work pressures. I’d really like to continue my studies in a PhD; however, I would have to be very careful in my commitments given my line of work.

So, all my previous blog posts haven’t been displaying (nor has my project proposal, annotated bibliography, or journal synopsis). Why you ask? Because you are looking at the blog of a goose! I included an add-in for my site which I was hoping to help productivity. Previously when using the blog sites I’ve written my blog entry during my lunch breaks or at the end of the night, then push it to my blog via script from a markdown file…. Turns out there’s a setting where it saves it, but doesn’t actually publish it. I hadn’t been on the site because I just wanted to focus on the information and not get carried away with formatting. That’ll teach me for trying to be a smarty pants!

Holy hell, that was an epic sprint to the finish. I got whatever it was my son had and just after the presentation on the 15th I ended up going straight home. I spent the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in bed. I considered requesting another extension, but it just didn’t feel appropriate. Ken has been really great thus far, and pushing that boundary is really unreasonable. I spent the day tidying up the annotated bibliography, which included fighting with Endnote for some reason. Either through delirium from the virus I have had, excitement that my Masters is almost complete, complete breakdown, or a combination of all of those, I had a bit of fun with the Journal Synopsis and lashed out on a ‘fun’ title. I know break out the geek glasses. The self reflection component of my assessment was really interesting to undertake. It had me question a number of my decisions during this project. It’s unfortunate that I hadn’t done this more thoroughly  throughout the rest of the subject as I think I may have come up with a different approach to delivery.

I’ve mustered up time from somewhere unknown and completed two articles. I like the format I have created where it is somewhat more conversational as opposed to a heading / body format as it is proving to be more readable. I’ve sorted out the issues I was having with Endnote, which turned out to be a problem in my Word template, essentially had to repair my normal.dot, which was somewhat frustrating.

Didn’t think I would get to this point after the last week. I’ve reviewed all articles, and have made my notes against each article. I haven’t mentioned it for this subject, but I love OneNote, it has simplified the whole note taking process, so I should almost be able to do a copy paste into my final document… almost. Throughout my whole masters (and my work) it is an unsung application hero. I originally added my reviews for each article against the Endnote record so that I could do an easy import; however, I discovered, that you still have to export all of this as a rich text format and then copy that over. I was kind of hoping for a more elegant solution.

I type this as the song ‘Cats in the Cradle’ plays through my mind. I’ve had to request an extension for Assessment 3 to the 19th. My son has been tremendously sick, which has taken pretty much all my attention, this naturally impacted my work and I have a presentation on the 15th which I need to prepare for. Ugh! As a result I’ve done nothing since my last post unfortunately. I lie, I think I prettied up some of my document, but that was about the only time I could muster.

I’ve now identified all articles, and reviewed another one. The list of articles I’m going to look at are below. Including them here because I’ve had a few issues with synching my Endnote, which blew away my last library.

References

• Baur-Ahrens, A. (2017). The power of cyberspace centralisation: analysing the example of data territorialisation. In M. Leese & S. Wittendorp (Eds.), Security/Mobility: Politics of Movement (pp. 37-56). Manchester University Press.
• Better Cloud. (2019). State of Insider Threats in the Digital Workplace. https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/03/BetterCloud-State-of-Insider-Threats-2019-FINAL.pdf
• FireEye. (2017). Security Orchestration: Best practices for any organization. https://www2.fireeye.com/rs/848-DID-242/images/wp-accessible-security-orchestration.pdf
• Griffith, M. K. (2018). A comprehensive security approach: bolstering Finnish cybersecurity capacity. Journal of Cyber Policy: SI: Comparative Industrial Policy and Cybersecurity, 3(3), 407-429. https://doi.org/10.1080/23738871.2018.1561919
• Islam, C., Babar, M., & Nepal, S. (2019). A Multi-Vocal Review of Security Orchestration. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 52(2), 1-45. https://doi.org/10.1145/3305268
• MacDonald, N., Orans, L., & Skorupa, J. (2019). The Future of Network Security is in the Cloud. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-1OG9EZYB&ct=190903&st=sb
• Mallinder, J., & Drabwell, P. (2013). Cyber security: a critical examination of information sharing versus data sensitivity issues for organisations at risk of cyber attack. Journal of business continuity & emergency planning, 7(2), 103-111.
• Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., & Ghalsasi, A. (2011). Cloud computing — The business perspective. Decision Support Systems, 51(1), 176-189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2010.12.006
• Miskon, S., Bandara, W., Gable, G., & Fielt, E. (2011). Success and failure factors of Shared Services: An Information Systems literature analysis. Proceedings of the International Conference on Research and Innovation in Information Systems, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRIIS.2011.6125726
• Poppensieker, T., & Riemenschnitter, R. (2018). A new posture for cybersecurity in a networked world (McKinsey on Risk, Issue 5). https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business Functions/Risk/Our Insights/A new posture for cybersecurity in a networked world/A-new-posture-for-cybersecurity-in-a-networked-world.pdf
• Skopik, F., Settanni, G., & Fiedler, R. (2016). A problem shared is a problem halved: A survey on the dimensions of collective cyber defense through security information sharing. Computers & Security, 60, 154-176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2016.04.003
• Tourani, R., Bos, A., Misra, S., & Esposito, F. (2019). Towards security-as-a-service in multi-access edge. The Fourth ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (pp. 358-363).  https://doi.org/10.1145/3318216.3363335

I received my assessment 2 feedback today. Well technically received it yesterday, but only got around to looking at it today. The words used in the feedback were quite positive; however, the actual numbers associated with the feedback for my scores were pretty disappointing. I have considered going back to Ken to ask for further feedback, but at this point I just want to get through the subject, which is proving to be a struggle. In the interest of self-improvement I’ll be sure to get more comprehensive feedback for assessment 3, but I’m hoping the numbers aren’t so poor so won’t need the additional feedback.

Work continues to provide smash my time. I managed to read through two of the four articles this week which I had identified the previous week. One of the articles was pretty poor and so I’ve removed it from my pool. The other article, “A Multi-Vocal Review of Security Orchestration”, proved excellent, but unfortunately gave me more to think about. During my review I constantly needed to pull myself back from the rabbit holes I kept falling down. It has however helped me identify a number of other articles which I’ve put on my list to look at in the hope of completing my hand.

This week at work has been horrendous so I’m unfortunately only making a single entry this week. As I noted in my last post, I had to start down the track of breaking the research into building blocks for the final outcome as opposed to looking at the topic as a whole. I’ve managed to come up with my building blocks being ‘Shared Services’, ‘Cloud Technologies’, ‘Cloud Services’, ‘Multifaceted Security Orchestration’. Obviously these are my initial keywords but variations of these will be used as I progress through the research. I’ve discovered four articles so far which may fit the bill, but have as yet only read through the abstracts for these and not completed a more thorough analysis per the steps I outlined in my proposal.