University Business - April 2007 - (Page 49)

Harlan Jorgensen of Northwestern College (Iowa) uses a device from eTelemetry to help manage and identify network user activity. with its smaller population of faculty, staff, and students. A security officer has been hired to put polices and procedures in place. One of the largest goals at Rice is to expand user awareness of identity issues, which Ribbeck says can be difficult. “People have grown up in a culture where everything is open and free,” he notes. “They like the collaborative aspect of the university network, but they really have to relearn how to protect themselves. We have to teach students, faculty, and staff the basics of identity protection. Otherwise, they’re going to get burned.” mind when changing technology or implementing new procedures, Jorgensen says. Student involvement can also be a boon for creating new programs around sign-on changes, since students are certainly not shy in voicing their opinions. “Our goal is to have a high level of service for users,” he adds. “One way to meet that goal is to find out what that means for users and what they expect.” At many IHEs, user acceptance can be boosted through increased automation, says Dinesh Bahad, senior director for education at Sun Microsystems. Robust provisioning systems that work behind the scenes can cut down on the number of passwords needed and, more importantly, remove users that shouldn’t be in the system. “There needs to be a certain level of self-service, where users can go in and identify themselves and their roles and make sure they’re not in the system twice,” says Bahad. “But there should also be provisioning done at a level invisible to the user.” Systems like those available from Sun and other vendors can help assign access levels and deprovision accounts from departing employees or those who’ve been granted temporary access. But that automation could result in conflicts from multiple systems joining together. “There is much more complexity in a college or Fresh Process When communicating the need for better IdM to those on campus, the education tends to extend to lessons on personal computing devices, notes Harlan Jorgensen, director of computing resources at Northwestern College (Iowa). “One of the biggest issues we face is students bringing in their own machines and logging on to the network,” he says. “It can be difficult, because they need clean access, but we have to make sure that machine isn’t a danger to the network.” Northwestern has implemented technology from eTelemetry that helps to manage and identify user activity. Jorgensen is currently in the process of writing more policies that address provisioning, account access, and IdM. In the past, he says, college officials felt confident because they had put up a strong intrusion detection system and solid firewalls, but then they gradually came to realize that those who resided within the college could be just as dangerous as those who were locked out. “We found that some students were finding ways around our rules in order to do file sharing,” he says. To boost communication about new policies and help inform students in particular about IdM issues and general use of computing resources, Jorgensen and others on the technology staff are working with a student development council. The group is assisting helping to create policy and to decide when network privileges should be yanked because of abuse. Having students make such decisions for other students helps keep end users in “It’s not practical to try and manage all the identities that are in the network, or [all who] want access. Some universities are like small cities, with visiting researchers and all kinds of complexities.” —David Murray, SunGard Higher Education university system than one managed by an enterprise, so automation can be more useful at a school than at a company,” says Bahad. “But keep in mind that the complexity might not necessarily be a technology problem. It may be a human problem that arises from employee and student systems mixing together.” Automation shouldn’t be implemented for its own sake, Bahad adds, but rather because it solves existing difficulties like overly complex records management and IdM issues. That kind of switch to a vendor-driven system is in progress at Northwestern University (Ill.), which is implementing Sun technology to replace a homegrown system that it’s had in place for the past decade, according to Thomas Board, director of Information Systems Architecture at the university. “We wanted an easily modifiable system,” he says. “Our homegrown technology couldn’t be maintained confidently and couldn’t be changed fast enough to meet the needs of the institution.” Relying on a vendor will also give Northwestern more of an opportunity to implement industry standards, Board notes, and universitybusiness.com April 2007 | 49 http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2007

Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Stats Watch
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Admissions
Independent Outlook
On The Hill
Future Shock
Spellings Lessons
Identity Mangaement
Getting A Bigger Picture
Facility Directors Speak Out
Internet Technology
Working the Web
What's New
Calendar of Events
Direct Connect
End Note

University Business - April 2007