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on Campus
Article
8 Spots for Tightening Security
on Campus
1/21/2004
Security is a tough challenge these days in any environment. On college and
university campuses, keeping data and systems secure is even tougher. That's
true for several reasons: academic environments encourage open atmospheres that
are conducive to security vulnerabilities; file-swapping remains a popular,
if often illegal, activity for students; funds and personnel are usually spread
thin; and many campuses run heterogeneous environments with a range of hardware
and software, some owned by the school, some by the students. Adding wireless
to the mix, as many schools now have done, compounds the problem.
Your challenge is to lock down your campus even under those conditions - while keeping your constituents reasonably happy with their access to information and services. It's a delicate balance, no doubt. To help you see how your peers are handling security, Syllabus talked with CIOs, Chief Security Officers and other IT managers at several institutions about their top concerns and how they're addressing them. From those discussions, we've put together the following list of security hot spots. You may find some of the ideas very useful; the rest may simply give you a sense of kinship with others in IT who are facing the same challenges you do in securing their own campuses.
1. Educate Every User
Nearly everyone we spoke with brought this up. Any IT administrator needs to spread the word on secure computing practices, but compounding your challenge is that a portion of your user base turns over each year, leaving you with a new set of customers to educate. You also must grant rights to technology resources initially, and probably adjust them during the year. Finally, you need to reclaim a student's access quickly once the student leaves school.
Ariel Silverstone, chief information security officer at 35,000-student Temple University outside Philadelphia, finds security awareness to be his No. 1 challenge. Unlike in a government or corporate environment, where the need for security is obvious, he points out that universities must work with users who are accustomed to open environments and often don't even think about security concerns. For example, "students today have always been able to download MP3" files, Silverstone points out, and many take file-sharing technologies for granted without considering how security might be compromised.
Silverstone says that Temple has successfully used a variety of methods to educate users on computer security, including posters, e-mail blasts, brochures, seminars, and a recent "security day" on campus that featured Pez containers shaped like bugs.
At the Rochester Institute of Technology, CIO Diane Barbour described similar ongoing education efforts, such as a recent "security week" that included students and faculty helping to present seminars on security. One focus: What users themselves can do to secure their own systems, as well as how the IT department can help.
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