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Special Annual Awards
2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
8/1/2008
At no point during the IT security infrastructure transformation, says Young, did he or his colleagues anticipate that the new system would work so well, so quickly. The results, he says, have been stunning, revealing that the institution has tallied 108 specific improvements spanning just about every aspect of security on campus. As by-products of these improvements, he adds, the automation of vulnerability management has saved the campus help desk countless hours of PC cleansing, and password resets have dropped from 50 percent of all help desk calls to 20 percent. Young maintains that security remediation efforts resulting from the reports coming from the high-end tools have allowed ODU to proactively correct deficiencies "expeditiously and comprehensively."
In addition to these direct benefits, the project has saved ODU staffers countless hours of administration time. More importantly, the holistic approach has positioned the school to pass just about any audit for compliance, and has catapulted the school into a formal risk-management program. Many ODU staffers now have the opportunity to take information security awareness training, incorporating a series of lectures and workshops designed to raise awareness about security breaches and help users prevent identity theft.
"Nobody takes anything for granted anymore," Young states emphatically.
The most unexpected benefit of the initiative was the way it inspired ODU technologists to launch a formal IT governance effort to establish policies that would reinforce all of the school's new security measures and improvements. Building on this success, the school has set its sights on the next milestone: ISO 17799 certification, involving the Code of Practice for Information Security Management. Stay tuned.
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