Open and Secure? SANS Reports on the InfoSec Challenges of Higher Education

Earlier this year, SANS Institute agreed to coordinate a study of the state of information security in the higher-education sector. Tenable signed on as a co-sponsor of this research project and is eagerly anticipating SANS’ forthcoming report on this subject – the report will be shared with the public during a webcast at 1 pm ET on June 17. Register for the webcast.

To add credibility and greater insight to the survey and report, SANS had Virginia Tech CISO and SANS instructor Randy Marchany co-author the report. Randy will also lead the June 17 webcast, which will feature Paul Asadoorian, technical product evangelist with Tenable, and other industry experts as co-presenters. Some of you may know Paul was a security admin at Brown University earlier in his career. He maintains many close connections to the higher-ed infosec community through Tenable and his SecurityWeekly.com podcasts.

Tenable works with a number of customers in the higher-education sector. Based on our experiences, we collaborated with TechTarget to produce an industry brief titled, "Addressing the Top 5 Security Challenges of Higher Education". These include:

1. The clash between a culture of sharing and the need for security
2. Avoiding the pitfalls of “hostile” dorm networks
3. Satisfying all those compliance demands
4. Maintaining visibility across segmentation
5. Achieving security effectiveness with limited resources

If you’re an IT security professional working for a college of university, I encourage you to grab a copy of the brief and let us know how it maps to the challenges you experience at your institution.

Anyhow, SANS’ higher-ed survey digs into the issues raised in Tenable’s paper. It also explores matters of funding, use and effectiveness of security tools, and future direction… They’re all important topics that will surely resonate with you practitioners and CSOs responsible for delivering effective security operations (and helping to maintain institutional integrity and reputation).

Get the higher-education survey report. Following the webcast, SANS will release the complete report detailing the survey results. Everyone attending the webcast will be offered the report. Also, Tenable will post the report on our website in the white paper section.