CSUCI student, Zane Gittins, is continuing his education to continue his cybersecurity career-path. He is currently working at HAAS Automation in Oxnard, CA as Systems Security Engineer.
Zane began working for Haas an internship through CSUCI’s Undergraduate program. During his undergraduate career, he worked under Dr. Pilarcyzk as an assistant in research focused on Persistent Homology which is an algebraic tool for measuring topological features of shapes and functions. For his undergraduate capstone project, he worked closely with Dr. Michael Soltys to provide a security best practices document to Haas. Upon graduation, Zane was hired full-time at Haas in Cybersecurity and also decided to continue to obtain his graduate degree in Computer Science.
Zane is a current student of CSUCI’s Master of Science Computer Science program. He feels that the master’s program at CSUCI will provide experience working on really challenging problems and by overcoming them, it boosts self-esteem because it validates skills through problem-solving. CSU Channel Islands offers both undergraduate and graduate opportunities in this growing field of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity involves problem-solving with a sense of purpose.
Cybersecurity is protection from digital attacks and methods to protect against the threats to businesses is a growing field. According to ZD Net, it takes most companies over six months, or around 197 days to detect a data breach.
According to Computer Weekly, the information security market is expected to grow 8.7% in 2019 to $124-Bn, driven in part by spending on consultation and implementation services related to the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy legislation. Haas Automation is a no exception to this threat and is tasking Zane and others to address this matter.
What’s next for Zane? He is looking forward to working more this year with GDPR in his professional life since it deals with the laws of privacy for European citizens where the company has a large customer base. Haas Automation headquarters their global operations locally. They have a sprawling 1.1 million square feet footprint and offer a full line of American-made machining products. They focus on hard goods, and as a multibillion-dollar company they have intellectual property, customer and financial data that must be protected.
Moreover, Zane is also enthusiastic for this year’s upcoming academic studies with the MS in Computer Science at CSUCI. He is looking forward to working again with Dr. Soltys and considering performing his thesis research on malware detection.