Central Florida ISSA has a new kid on the block: ME!

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of all of the local user groups in Central Florida. I have blogged about DotNetNuke and ONETUG but there is another group close to my little recruiter heart…ISSA. ISSA is a great group of security professionals from Central Florida (and beyond) and they meet monthly. They talk about a wide variety of issues (my favorite thus far is SQL Injections…very sexy) and it is one of my favorite meetings of the month to attend. Seriously.

Yesterday’s topic was “Building an Incident Handling Team” and Kevin Johnson was the speaker. He was a very funny guy and did a great job of holding the attention of everyone…not necessarily the easiest thing to do with a long presentation right before lunch!

In this presentation, Kevin Johnson discussed the importance of having an incident handling team and how to form an incident handling team (who to include, etc.) Additionally, he also spoke about being prepared to respond to incidents without causing harm to the company, its assets or incident evidence.

After the presentation, still before lunch (Lord was I hungry by this point!), it was mentioned that they needed a few new officers for the ISSA chapter and one of those positions was an Event Coordinator. This caught my attention. For those of you that know me personally, you already know where I’m going with this. But, for those of you that don’t, I’ll clue you in. I am the hailed logistics queen of KForce. Alysia “Nuts” Hazelton always teases me because I always have a question for everything and I am very focused on details to the point it is extremely annoying. Hey, we all have flaws. She also always says in my past life I was an event planner because I love nothing more than to orchestrate events and boss people around. I also planned one heck of a wedding…that ended in one heck of a divorce, but that’s another story entirely. Long story short: I live to plan.

Needless to say, before I could help myself, I was signing myself up for the position. I am now the ISSA Events Director.

A large part of this position entails arranging speakers and picking the topics for the monthly meetings…which is a little scary for me since I am only technical to a point, but being the quintessential overachiever and nerd, I’m always up for a challenge. I am looking for suggestions though from folks in IT that are a lot smarter than me (I’m sure there are a few…maybe?). If there is anything you’d like to see featured at ISSA (that is relevant, of course!) shoot me an email and let me know! The more feedback the better!

I’m very excited about this opportunity and I can’t wait to get really involved. To learn more about the group, check out: http://centralflorida.issa.org