Log Book
A weekly update on this project.
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Initial Meeting
Had my first meeting with RCL Managing Director Gabriel T. Akindeju in regards to my project. He explained the business problem and gave me a rough overview of the outcome of this project.
NEXT STEP: Decided to wait till the first week to discuss this project with Mano, for departmental approval. -
Week 1
Had my second meeting with Gabriel, to discuss the changes required to meet the BTECH project requirements. We finalised the minor details of the project, where we are creating a leveraging platform, with the matrix taking up majority of the time assigned for this project. Initially there was no platform to be created to have a checklist for the compliance, however due to the amendments in the requirements, we had decided to include it as part of the project.
NEXT STEP: Talk to Mano about academic supervisor. -
Week 2
Talked to Mano about having Dr. Lech Janzceski as my academic supervisor as his expertise lie in Information Security and Regulatory Compliance sector. Mano also suggested Dr. Yun-Sing Koh, for the second half of my project with the building of the platform.
NEXT STEP: Need to organise a meeting with the two supervisors to discuss the project and ask for their views on it. -
Week 5
Had a meeting with Dr. Janczewski about my project, he gave me a suggestions that were slightly different to those suggested by Gabriel. Also met with Dr. Yun-Sing to discuss about the project, however her expertise lie in data mining. I was not sure what I was explaining to her so she suggested we have meeting with everyone involved to iron out the creases.
NEXT STEP: Need to organise a meeting with the two supervisors and Gabriel to clarify my scope for the project. -
Mid Semester Break
Had a meeting with Dr. Janczewski, Dr. Koh and Gabriel about my project scope. Gabriel was able to provode a clearer understanding to the other supervisors and myself. Dr. Koh explained the limitations of BTech and whehter certain aspects of the scope are viable as well as what I will be examined on. Finally we were able to set a scope that met all the requirements.
NEXT STEP: Send a brief to everyone involved detailing my problem and scope. -
Mid Semester Break
Wrote a breif and sent to all the supervisors and mentors. I received some feedback and I started to research about the standards and industry I would like to focus on. After a bit of research I found that I would be focusing on Financial Instutions and their top three standards. I finalised on PCI, SOX and ISO 27002 as the standards I would be focusing for this project.
NEXT STEP: Analyse the three standards. Prepare for BTech Introductory Seminar. -
Week 6
Prepared for BTech Introductory Seminar and presented on 22 March 2015. Received good feedback and used this feedback to focus on the right standards as well as look at current research.
NEXT STEP: Over the holiday break, I need to start my BTech mid year report. -
Week 7
Started to analyse the standards at a very high level and trying to organise each of them into the 15 impact zones. Due to the volume of controls I expect this to take a minimum of two weeks to sort through.
NEXT STEP: Continue to analyse the controls. -
Week 8
Got a structure of the controls into a matrix and started to write to my BTech mid year report about this matrix.
NEXT STEP: Work on BTech Report to meet the due date. -
Week 9
Created a basic structure of the report. Had a meeting with Dr. Koh to ensure that my report was upto Btech Standards. She suggested a few improvements and sections to be added.
NEXT STEP: Add in additional sections into the report. -
Week 10
Found some issues with the matrix, fixed a few of them. Have to research about certain controls to understand their true meaning so classification can be done properly.
NEXT STEP: Fix all the issues of the matrix. -
Week 11
Ensure my matrix is finalised and start researching on related works, especially research done in this field and related platforms available.
NEXT STEP: Finalise mid year report. -
Week 12
All the focus this week is on finishing the mid year report, getting it editted and submitting to Dr. Janczewski and Mano for grading which is due on the 8 June 2015.
NEXT STEP: Exams start next week, project will be put on hold. -
Exam period for university has started so my work load for the project will be reduced for the coming few weeks. With this in mind I will be hoping to complete the matrix, so it is grouped correctly into each of the Impact Zones. I will also be meeting Gabriel and Yun-Sing to finalise the technologies that I will be using in creating this platform.
I hope to make up for the time lost over the exam period in the 4 weeks of mid-year break after my final exam. -
Week 13
Start of a new semester, had our Mid Year Presentations. (The slide deck can be downloaded from the download page.) After a meeting with Yun Sing, I had decided to use MYSQL for the backend of the system. I created an ERD design, which shows the relationships and attributes of each of the tables.
NEXT STEP: Need to organise a meeting with Yun Sing to make sure, the ERD design doesn't have any redundancies. -
Week 14
After getting approval for my ERD design from Yun-Sing, I decided to add data, which I didn't have. So my next step for the next three weeks is to analyse the three standards and fnd the commonalities and put them into a matrix, where I have a base control and alignments, that differ from the base control for each standard.
NEXT STEP: Meet with Gabriel and find out how to analyse the standards. -
Week 15
Had a meeting with Gabriel and discussed the limitation of time to analyse all the 12 sections of each of the standards. We came to a decision of only analysing three of the twelve. Started to analyse Policy management, took me the entire week to analyse and form two controls.
NEXT STEP: Continue to analyse the standards and form a comparison construct. -
Week 16
Continued to analyse Policy Management and finalised the base controls and alignments. Started to look at incident response management.
NEXT STEP: Continue to analyse the standards and form a comparison construct. -
Week 17
Continued to analyse incident response management and finalised the base controls and alignments. This is a large zone to analyse and took the whole week. I need to finalise this and move on quickly.
NEXT STEP: Finish ICM and move on to back up. -
Week 18
Finalised the ICM as well as finished analysing back up. Now that I have the data, I need to start working on my MYSQL databases.
NEXT STEP: Generate MYSQL tables and relationships. Import data and start writing my final report over the two week break. -
Mid Semester Break
Spent the two weeks working on my BTech Report as well as creating the tables in MySQL WorkBench. Due to other papers having reports due I was unable to focus on my project.
NEXT STEP: Transform the comparison construct to table data and convert to csv. -
Week 19
After converting data to csv files we came across an issue with the table structure and due to the time constraint we were unable to make a major change so we adjusted the table structure to able to have a prototype to demonstrate how the platform works.
NEXT STEP: Find a software that will convert my laptop into a server. -
Week 20
Created a new ERD design. Got the design approved by Gabriel and started to import the data into my tables and linking them to have foreign keys and correct relationships. Started to work on the front-end design of the prototype.
NEXT STEP: Complete front-end design and start work on my report. -
Week 21
Since I had never programmed in PHP I spent most of the week learning how PHP works and how to code it. I had to learn the connection required to map it to my database.
NEXT STEP: Start programming the front-end. -
Week 22
Had a few starting issue with my programming. The server software was not loading my pages. Fixed those issues and made a rough structure.
NEXT STEP: Complete the programming and include into my report. -
Week 23
Finished the rough structure of the prototype. Have to work on my report and presentation.
NEXT STEP: Finalise the report and presentation. -
Week 24
Completed my report and started practising my presentation.
NEXT STEP: Present and submit the report.