Dylan Ball's Journey at Huntington Bank

In the Spring of 2021, Dylan Ball graduated from the McClure School's ITS program with a minor in business. Only a few months later Ball received an Information Security job offer from Huntington Bank in July through LinkedIn. On his profile, Ball posted his final project from the ITS 4750 course which piqued the interest of a Huntington employer. 

Within Information Security, there are three ‘lines’ of defense. Ball works in the second, which focuses on risk management, identifies potential issues, and implements proper security in a company’s vision and goals. The second line serves as a risk oversight operation. The first line is the day-to-day operation that identifies and mitigates security risks as they come. The third line of defense is an auditing team that works to prevent future risk.

As the second line is all internal, Ball does not directly work with clients. At Huntington Bank, the second line often works with the first line, and many other companies function similarly. 

As an Information Technology Risk Analyst, Ball's role is to analyze and discuss cyber threats that come up outside of Huntington. Ball attends weekly meetings that look at external events to see what the company can be properly prepared for. Ball states that about half of his work is done collaboratively and half is done individually but that nothing is done entirely alone. His position entails data analysis and the formation of risk metrics. A core tenet of information security is improving upon user-developed applications that serve to compile organizational data to analyze trends.

Information Security employees at Huntington Bank work with employees at other similarly sized banks to assess threats and determine the best allocation of resources. This means that security jeopardization, at large, is seen as a dire threat across the industry.

Regarding advice for students, Ball advises current ITS students to gain different perspectives of the industry and to enroll in elective classes in OHIO's ITS program. He also advocates for students to go out of their comfort zone and to enroll in more technical classes to gain more operational knowledge of the field. Ball states that OHIO’s ITS program is unique in the sense that it combines business and technical perspectives of the industry, and that this has been an important asset to his career.

“Experience is tantamount,” says Ball. Internships are the perfect experience for students to gain knowledge of the workplace and corporate environments allow students to immerse themselves in the industry. 

The McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies strives to offer the best academic programs in the IT (Information Technology), the game development and the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) industries. Our programs and certificates cover numerous aspects of the rapidly changing industries of information networking, cybersecurity, data privacy, game development, digital animation and the academic side of esports.