New CISO wants to protect MSU’s data, information, and knowledge

<p><a href="https://tech.msu.edu/about/office-cio/security/">Siu</a> is from the Cleveland Ohio area and came to MSU from Case Western Reserve University.</p><p>“I'm really excited to come to Michigan State and learn another organization structure, a whole lot of new people, and build new relationships,” says Siu. “I hope to bring what I have in terms of experience and goals to help develop the leadership among IT teams and the security team overall and help Michigan State become a little more agile from an IT standpoint and able to respond to the constantly growing security threats.”</p><p>Siu shares his definition for information security and says it’s important to distinguish between data and information.</p><p>“We keep thinking about how we are protecting information by balancing out the risk of deploying it, giving it away, and making it more broadly available to the community because that's what the mission of university is, to discover knowledge and disseminate it and share it.</p><p>“I didn't say data. I said knowledge, and knowledge is on the top of the stack of information. So I have data that helps us define information, and then you use that to create knowledge. Protecting that means making sure its integrity has not been modified. Knowledge grows and evolves. As the chief information security officer, my role is to help ensure that all the IT systems and all the workflow that goes on around that helps the education and research missions achieve their goals.</p><p>“I'm essentially going to be Michigan State's IT risk manager. And that means not running away from risk. It means taking some and understanding what those qualities are that it takes to take risks without exposing us too far. Obviously, information security in higher education has run into broad challenges as we've moved a lot of things into cloud-based resources. It's clear that information technology has revolutionized how higher education works in the last 20 years.”</p><p>Siu talks about some of his short and long-term goals fo