Re: Physical Security - How many IT Departments have Restricted Access?

[Ken Connelly <Ken.Connelly () UNI EDU>]

Sean -

We have a similar physical layout.  There is one door to the IT office
area from the hallway that is unlocked during business hours.  A
reception desk inside that door is usually staffed, but not 100% of the
time.  There are other staff near the reception area that respond to
visitors when the reception desk is vacant.  We've operated in that mode
since moving to our current location in 1990 without incident.

- ken

Clark, Sean wrote:
> Greetings, all.  I am new to the Educause Security list and I hope
> that I am posting this question to the right list.
>
> I am the manager of a newly created IT Security group at a university
> and I have a question for other IT professionals on this list.  There
> has been a recent initiative that was been proposed by one of our
> upper management people to unlock the front doors of our IT department
> during business hours, in order to be more customer friendly and not
> make people who visit our offices feel that they are not trusted.
>
> Background:
> We've had ingress to the IT department offices restricted by badge
> access for many years.  Within the offices there is a server room that
> has separately-keyed badge access (representing two layers of physical
> security).
>
> While I acknowledge that there is a negative impact to convenience
> that is associated with restricting access to IT services premises, I
> have been making the argument that unlocking the doors would increase
> the risk to:
>
> 1) unsecured hardware that may contain private data (mostly
> customer/user systems that are being repaired by workstation support)
> 2) the workstations of multiple admins who are using elevated accounts
> to access to switches, routers and servers with private data on them
> 3) a variety of laptops, PDAs and other portable devices, owned by the
> IT department and our customers
> 4) one less layer of physical security protecting our server room
>
> I'd like to hear back from IT professionals at other universities, to
> see where our department sits in comparison to the norm: is access to
> your IT department restricted?  If so, how is that access restricted?
> If your department is not physically secured, what kinds of problems
> have you run into?
>
> Thanks, in advance, for any thoughts/suggestions that you are willing
> to share.
>
> Sean

--
- Ken
=================================================================
Ken Connelly             Associate Director, Security and Systems
ITS Network Services                  University of Northern Iowa
email: Ken.Connelly () uni edu   p: (319) 273-5850 f: (319) 273-7373