Re: number of IT security staff

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 15:35:23 EST, Alec Yasinsac said:
> University of Florida, like Va Tech, has a very active academic computing
> security presence.

> > UF has over 45,000 students, 3 full-time IT security staff, 1 part-time
> > security
> > staff, and 1 part-time PR person.

Note that our model is a bit different - I think we only have 2 people that
are "full time security", and that would be Randy and his boss.  Backing that
up are probably around a dozen or so people who have "security" as one of
their job description line items - so for instance I'm part-time allocated to
support Randy's stuff, the people in our router and DNS support teams are available
on an as-needed basis for incident response, there's interfaces to our help
desk and so on.

Randy likes to call it the "volunteer rescue squad" model, because that really
*is* how we handle incident response.  One of its big effects is that it makes
our *presence* a lot bigger than the FTE count would make it look - if you pile
it up as FTE's, we'd probably have a hard time reaching '4', but if you count it
as "number of people on campus known as helpful security resources", it's closer
to a dozen.  It also helps with coverage issues - if you have all 4 people already
dealing with incidents and another one comes in, you're basically screwed.  If
you have a dozen people, it takes a *really* severe case of Bad Karma before
you can't find anybody who can't at least find a way to contain the issue until
it can be dealt with.  I think even at the height of some of the worms like Nachi,
we *still* could have dealt with an unrelated incident if it had happened (I know
*I* didn't have to do much during that particular festivity, so if some Unixoid
box had gotten whacked, I could have gone and dealt with that...)

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