WHAT DOES AN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECURITY SPECIALIST DO?
Published: Oct 01, 2025 - The Information Technology Security Specialist plans and implements the organization’s information security strategy, develops policies, and ensures compliance with industry standards and audits. This role involves monitoring networks and systems for vulnerabilities or breaches, leading incident response and forensic investigations, and recommending security enhancements to management. The Specialist also supports engineering teams, installs and manages security software, and educates staff through training and awareness programs to strengthen overall organizational security.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Information Technology Security Specialist
1. Information Technology Security Specialist Functions
- Access Control: Define access privileges, controls, and resources.
- Reporting: Provide quarterly reporting on Active Directory account de-provisioning.
- Reporting: Provide quarterly reporting of security and distribution group membership.
- Documentation: Maintain a detailed list of each position’s security and distribution group default assignment.
- Collaboration: Work closely with the Network Engineer and serve as the secondary resource in their absence.
- Network Management: Monitor, maintain, and configure network equipment at the direction of the Network Engineer.
- Incident Response: Identify abnormalities and report violations.
- Vendor Collaboration: Collaborate with security vendors and auditors to perform security assessments, audits, penetration tests, and information gathering.
- Security Improvement: Work with other teams to identify and eliminate security weaknesses in workstations, networks, and servers.
- Compliance Management: Establish and maintain an IT compliance and information security framework, policies, standards, and guidelines.
- Policy Enforcement: Adhere strictly to and enforce system security policies while following all company standards.
- Regulatory Compliance: Comply with applicable laws and regulations, including banking laws, PCI/PHI, and HIPAA requirements.
2. Information Technology Security Specialist Accountabilities
- Asset Protection: Protect technology assets, information, data, and intellectual property by developing and updating security plans, frameworks, policies, and tools.
- Risk Management: Continuously manage, monitor, and evaluate system controls and access management to mitigate risk in line with business and regulatory requirements.
- Security Assessment: Conduct security assessments, security authorizations, security planning, and security policy development.
- Training and Testing: Deliver security training, vulnerability assessments, security controls testing, and risk assessments.
- Control Implementation: Implement security controls and conduct security awareness training for staff.
- Research & Development: Research new security tools and industry best practices to enhance organizational protection.
- Team Direction: Direct IT teams on effective methods to protect corporate assets.
- Innovation: Identify innovative approaches to implement world-class security measures.
- Reporting: Compile monthly reports on IT security management.
- Self-Development: Manage professional growth and self-development.
3. Information Technology Security Specialist Job Summary
- Policy Development: Develop and maintain information security policies and procedures in collaboration with multiple departments.
- Project Coordination: Coordinate with internal technology teams to support security-related projects and initiatives.
- Governance Support: Assist governance activities by contributing to internal audits and addressing external regulatory compliance requirements.
- Process Improvement: Enhance the efficiency of business processes within the Information Security Team by promoting consistency and standardization.
- Organizational Protection: Support organizational efforts to protect people, assets, and reputation through effective security practices.
- Stakeholder Communication: Provide executive stakeholders with concise updates and security insights tailored to business objectives.
- Risk Management: Alert senior leadership to emerging risks and propose actionable remediation measures.
- Control Enhancement: Identify and recommend opportunities for strengthening security controls across the organization.
- Continuity Oversight: Oversee periodic reviews of business continuity strategies to ensure readiness.
- Disaster Recovery: Assist in evaluating and improving disaster recovery plans for operational resilience.
- Governance Culture: Promote a culture of proactive governance and continuous security improvement.
4. Information Technology Security Specialist Responsibilities
- Vulnerability Management: Manage day-to-day operations of vulnerability management tools such as Tenable.
- Scanning and Assessment: Ensure that all environments have adequate scans and assessments performed.
- Issue Remediation: Work with technology owners and platform leads to ensure vulnerabilities and issues are patched and remediated in a timely manner.
- Technology Research: Research and recommend emerging security technologies and tools to address current and future threats relevant to the environment.
- Incident Response: Participate in the security incident response process.
- Reporting Framework: Develop a vulnerability reporting framework to communicate key data points vertically and horizontally.
- Customer Reporting: Provide a single point of contact to the account management and delivery teams for all operational security-related reporting for the customer account.
- Operational Oversight: Oversee the implementation and management of operational security reporting activities.
- Team Coordination: Meet with the account team weekly to review security reports, status, risks, issues, incidents, and outstanding activities.
- Security Education: Provide security-related education to ensure security awareness and knowledge of applicable security policies and processes to internal teams.
- Policy Guidance: Answer questions and concerns regarding applicable security policies and processes.
5. Information Technology Security Specialist Details
- Network Support: Provide network and B2B setup and support.
- Customer Support: Deliver exceptional customer support for internal employees on network, hardware, and software issues, including computers, printers, routers, and firewalls.
- Mobile Management: Manage and support mobile device hardware and accounts.
- Hardware and Software Implementation: Implement and install new hardware and software to meet business needs.
- Technology Planning: Provide insight into future technology hardware and software requirements in a growing retail business.
- Standards Development: Develop and maintain business standards for network, hardware, and software usage.
- Collaboration: Collaborate with business departments to create and maintain valued systems and compliance training.
- License Management: Maintain and manage necessary hardware and software operating licenses.
- Compliance Oversight: Ensure compliance standards and overall structure for the retail market.
- PCI Compliance: Maintain up-to-date knowledge of credit card and PCI compliance requirements.
- Best Practices: Provide best practices for operating all business systems.
6. Information Technology Security Specialist Duties
- Security Controls: Monitor, tune, and develop technical IT security controls and frameworks to ensure effective preparation, monitoring, and response to threats.
- Risk Management: Ensure a risk-based approach to IT security is adopted across all business areas and solutions.
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate with IT security team members to design, implement, and maintain security.
- Threat Hunting: Prepare for, identify, and remediate cyber threats through active threat hunting.
- Control Operations: Operate and maintain IT security controls related to SIEM, DLP, vulnerability management, cyber threat intelligence, and endpoint protection.
- Cloud Security: Operate and maintain security controls with a focus on cloud deployments and implementations.
- Risk Assessment: Conduct IT security risk assessments for high-impact projects, and define security mitigating controls impacting the technology architectures of the organization, service providers, and business partners.
- Procedure Review: Review and update IT security procedures to align with best practices and mitigate current and emerging threats.
- Audit Resolution: Own IT security monitoring and response-related FRB and internal audit findings, and ensure effective and timely resolution with IT security.
- Vendor Management: Maintain relationships with third-party IT security vendors and strategic partners.
7. Information Technology Security Specialist Job Description
- Certification Management: Security document preparation, certification testing, and certification maintenance.
- Security Training: Develop and deliver information systems security education and awareness programs.
- Issue Resolution: Collaborate with the IT department and developers to address identified security issues.
- Incident Response: Design and maintain security breach response and mitigation strategies.
- Control Implementation: Translate business and operational requirements into actionable security controls.
- Awareness Testing: Conduct controlled social engineering exercises to assess employee security awareness.
- Quality Management: Implement and sustain the Quality Management System in alignment with ISO standards.
- Documentation Compliance: Ensure documentation is created, reviewed, and updated according to compliance requirements.
- Process Evaluation: Monitor the effectiveness of quality processes through regular evaluations.
- Lean Initiatives: Identify opportunities for Lean initiatives to reduce waste and improve efficiency.
- Continuous Improvement: Drive continual improvement efforts across security and quality management functions.
- Culture Promotion: Promote a culture of security and quality awareness throughout the organization.
8. Information Technology Security Specialist Overview
- Control Improvement: Review current security controls and recommend and implement improvements, and ensure security tooling is implemented, maintained, and uplifted.
- Standards Development: Create and maintain technical security standards and procedures.
- Tool Evaluation: Test and evaluate security tools and services.
- Monitoring and Alerting: Build monitoring and alerting capabilities to proactively detect security breaches and threats.
- Tool Integration: Integrate security tools into the existing environment.
- Security Auditing: Conduct IT security audits across the business.
- Penetration Testing: Perform penetration testing, run scans, and simulate attacks on systems to identify exploitable weaknesses.
- Risk Identification: Identify potential areas of risk that require mitigation.
- SOP Development: Develop and implement standard operating procedures (SOPs).
- Access Management: Maintain effective access controls across the business.
- Breach Investigation: Investigate security breaches, including root cause analysis.
- Incident Response: Lead incident response, minimize impact, and conduct technical and forensic investigations into breaches to determine the cause and extent of damage.
- Risk Mitigation: Mitigate future IT security risks.
9. Information Technology Security Specialist Tasks
- Security Strategy: Plan and carry out an organization’s information security strategy.
- Standards Development: Develop a set of security standards and best practices/policies for the organization, and recommend security enhancements to management.
- Audit Compliance: Ensure a smooth audit from information security auditors and ensure certification compliance.
- Vulnerability Assistance: Assist engineering teams in identifying security vulnerabilities and proposing solutions.
- Network Monitoring: Monitor the organization’s networks and systems for security breaches or intrusions.
- Vulnerability Testing: Conduct periodic scans of networks to find vulnerabilities, and conduct penetration testing to simulate attacks and highlight weaknesses that could be exploited by malicious parties.
- Emergency Response: Develop emergency response strategies to recover from security breaches and lead incident response activities to minimize impact.
- Forensic Investigation: Lead technical and forensic investigations into breaches, determine the cause and extent of damage, and prepare reports of findings for management.
- Intrusion Detection: Identify and install software that notifies of intrusions and monitors for irregular system behavior.
- Software Protection: Install and use security software such as firewalls and data encryption programs to protect sensitive organizational information.
- User Support: Assist computer users with the installation or configuration of new security products and procedures.
- Security Training: Educate the workforce on information security through training and awareness programs.
- System Evaluation: Ensure internal and external development and deployment systems are regularly evaluated for security weaknesses and updated on demand.
10. Information Technology Security Specialist Roles
- Security Specialist: Act as a technical and business security specialist for the development, implementation, and maintenance of policies, procedures, and assessments for cybersecurity.
- Policy Management: Review and update security policies, standards, and procedures to ensure compliance with industry standards and recommend additional standards and policies as the industry evolves.
- Control Assessment: Assess the effectiveness of security policies, processes, procedures, and controls against established standards, guidelines, and requirements, and identify improvement actions to maintain the appropriate level of data protection.
- Process Improvement: Suggest changes to security processes and policies.
- Program Monitoring: Monitor the activities of the security program.
- Vendor Coordination: Coordinate internal security efforts with the Managed Security Services Program (MSSP) vendor under the direction of the IT Security Manager.
- Risk and Threat Assessment: Identify and assess the results of threat, risk, and vulnerability assessments in coordination with the MSSP, and update assessments regularly based on new industry controls.
- Security Controls: Provide recommended security controls, evaluate and update baseline tests for applications and operating systems, document results, and present recommended changes and related risks to the Risk Governance Committee.
- Risk Program Management: Develop, implement, and maintain the IT security and risk management program.
- Risk Assessment: Develop and implement an ongoing risk assessment program to define, identify, and classify critical assets, assess threats and vulnerabilities, and recommend solutions.
- Security Planning: Draft and maintain the security plan.
- Vulnerability Assessment: Conduct and analyze risk and vulnerability assessments within new and existing applications, systems, and network architectures, and recommend solutions to eliminate or minimize potential risks.
- Best Practices Integration: Recommend NIST Cyber Security, NIST Risk Assessment Framework, CIS Critical Security Controls, and other relevant industry best practices for incorporation into policies, procedures, standards, and designs.
- Incident Response: Participate in incident response activities as directed by the CIO or Information Security Manager.