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

[Theresa Rowe <rowe () OAKLAND EDU>]

Our IT department is in an open classroom building on the main floor.  We do
not have any formal entrance nor do we have a reception area.  Our hallway
offices are the main pass through to another building that was adding to the
campus around 8 year ago.  The datacenter is in the middle of this area,
with glass walls that we painted sometime in the early 1990s.  At least the
datacenter doors have keycode access.

Theresa Rowe

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Clark, Sean <Sean.Clark () ucdenver edu> 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



--
Theresa Rowe
Chief Information Officer
Oakland University