Cal Poly Drives Resilience While Training Tomorrow’s Security Leaders

Cal Poly students learn by doing.

That’s not by chance; it’s been a core tenet of the California Polytechnic State University’s founding philosophy since it was formed in 1901. In Cal Poly’s Security Operations Center (SOC), which is tasked with providing round-the-clock protection from cyber threats, “it’s students who provide the first, tier-one incident response,” says Doug Lomsdalen, chief information security officer for Cal Poly. 

But as the university began to migrate to the cloud, its security environment became exponentially more complex. Lomsdalen and his team needed more visibility into the university’s distributed systems so they could quickly detect security incidents — an ability that proved especially important during the pandemic. Now Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) provide unprecedented visibility into Cal Poly’s security environment and offer its students critical skills that will serve them (and their future employers) well — long after they graduate.

Splunk makes the grade with best-in-class protection

Universities are notorious for being vulnerable to phishing attacks, and Cal Poly receives over a million hits a day that they consider attacks on the university. “I know the number of threats against the university is higher and the complexity greater than ever before,” says Bill Britton, chief information officer for Cal Poly, who had witnessed the power of Splunk while working with the U.S. Department of Defense community. “But I also know that we’re protecting the university at a level we’ve never had before.” 

Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk ES have transformed the university’s ability to detect security incidents. Since it standardizes the retention period for security-related events, Splunk ES is flexible enough to allow modifications with no interruptions in detecting security events — helping the university adapt to increasingly complex cyber threats. “Splunk allows us to be more proactive through the visibility it has given us,” says Doug Lomsdalen. “By giving us that visibility, we can quickly respond to potential threats and better protect the campus.”

The Splunk platform has also simplified how the security team assigns and keeps track of incident handling. “We have 10 staff and students looking at security events,” Britton says, “and Splunk makes it easy to keep track of who’s handling which alerts.”

From campus to companies around the world

The students working in Cal Poly’s SOC keep busy. But thanks to the Splunk platform’s ease of use, they can spend their time doing meaningful work, not just onboarding. “Our student assistants have been incredible at getting up and running with Splunk after two weeks of training,” Britton says. “We frequently assign them to add or modify Splunk dashboards, reports and alerts, as well as to enable more Splunk Enterprise Security features as we add new security event sources to Splunk.” 

When they’re not thwarting would-be attacks on the university’s environment, Cal Poly students are assisting with educational and training programs on campus and at the California Cybersecurity Institute (CCI). There, they help guide the next generation of cybersecurity professionals and set themselves up for successful careers in IT after they graduate. In fact, every recent student summer hire in cybersecurity studied for and passed the Splunk Core Certified User exam through an early adoption of Splunk’s Academic Alliance Program — just another way Cal Poly delivers on its promise of real-world learning to its students.  

Looking forward, Cal Poly plans to almost double the amount of data processed on the Splunk platform to stay resilient and proactive as the cyber threat landscape continues to grow in complexity and size. Students will be engaged in the effort every step of the way.