Interview Highlights: The Scale of LSU Security: Sumit Jan's 14-person team protects roughly 20,000 endpoints, 6,000 servers, and over 100,000 users across LSU's identity management, incident response, and ERP security. Unlike a single corporation, LSU functions like a multi-company organization—academics, research, athletics, and community relations all require different, case-by-case security approaches rather than one uniform policy. Goodbye Mainframe: LSU fully retired its legacy mainframe system in 2025, migrating student records, registration, and grades to Workday, alongside a parallel move to Okta for identity and access management just 30 days later. Shifting to SaaS platforms like Workday reduces institutional risk by providing built-in redundancy and backups, versus the fragility of aging on-campus legacy hardware. Born From the Ransomware Wave: A surge of ransomware attacks on higher-ed institutions nationally pushed LSU to partner with the Board of Regents and GOHSEP to build a shared Security Operations Center (SOC) model in 2022–2023. A Student-Powered SOC: LSU's SOC, run through LONI, now supports 34 public higher-ed institutions statewide, staffing students 8-to-5 while a private partner covers nights, weekends, and holidays. TigerSOC Expands the Model: A second SOC, TigerSOC, has LSU students working as subcontractors for Atlanta-based Techstream, gaining real-world experience securing casino, healthcare, and banking clients—complete with federal background checks where required. Strong Job Outcomes: Nearly all graduating SOC analyst students land security jobs at or before graduation, often earning more within a year or two than LSU can pay a starting analyst. Open to Any Major: Jan intentionally recruits beyond computer science, arguing critical thinking matters more than a technical background—psychology, sociology, and engineering majors all bring valuable cross-disciplinary perspective to security analysis.
