SEC405: Business Finance Essentials

Turn Your Financial Uncertainty into Financial Clarity!

SEC405: Business Finance Essentials will:

• Increase your business financial literacy
• Improve your understanding and awareness of business financial health
• Prepare you to partner with your organization's finance team
• Provide you with the skills and knowledge to serve as a trusted financial advisor to your organization

Course Overview

What would it feel like to have confidence in navigating your business financials before dedicating another hour to cybersecurity work or spending another dollar of your cybersecurity budget? This course will give you the confidence and clarity to understand and effectively communicate financial stewardship. The knowledge and skills you learn in SEC405 will contribute to your own success as well as the success of the cybersecurity team you are privileged to lead, and, ultimately, the success of your organization.

In Business Finance Essentials you will learn the importance of a clear business case by creating one yourself during a course exercise. Need to design a multi-year budget? No problem! We will talk about the rationale for that design and then undertake an exercise to create such a budget. You'll be able to use these examples as templates later when you need to do these tasks yourself!

Objectives

What will this course immediately prepare you to do?

• Fully understand what your Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and finance team are saying
• Stand out as an engaged partner in shared business success
• Follow a repeatable eight-step Finance Framework that helps you understand and communicate finance more effectively
• Discover and successfully interpret an organization's financial goals
• Better align the cybersecurity program to the strategic priorities of the organization
• Better understand the business side of an enterprise, including business decisions and tradeoffs
• Improve partnerships with key leaders
• Achieve alignment of your cybersecurity program

What will the Chief Financial Officer notice after you take this course and apply the concepts you've learned?

• You ask better questions of your CFO, Controller, and Finance team
• You can interpret common financial statements
• You demonstrate strong financial stewardship
• You are able to create a multi-year budget
• You make a greater effort to work with finance colleagues

What strategies can build a meaningful relationship with your Chief Financial Officer?

• Understand what is important to your CFO
• Demonstrate the interest, skills, and knowledge that make you stand out
• More specifically, be able to interpret a balance sheet, cash flow statement, and income statement

How can you demonstrate financial stewardship?

• Think through and assess such concepts as "before the next dollar is spent" and "before the next hour is spent"
• Ensure that your efforts are definitively focused on the highest risks

What does a Chief Information Security Officer need to know about finance to be successful?

• How to successfully navigate the mysterious realm of business finance
• How to secure multi-year funding for cybersecurity projects
• How to create a business case

What You Will Receive

• Electronic courseware for learning how to understand business finance
• Course book
• Lab workbook with completed examples
• MP3 audio files of the complete course lecture
• An enabling and repeatable eight-step Finance Framework created to help you understand and communicate finances more effectively

What Courses To Take Next

• SANS SEC402: Cybersecurity Writing: Hack the Reader
• SANS SEC403: Secrets to Successful Cybersecurity Presentation