In November 2005, we posed the following challenge to our readers as part of our IT Leadership Awards:

The Challenge

Your school’s administration has seen the recent news stories on security breaches at higher education institutions, and they’re getting nervous about the number of notebook PCs — with confidential data stored on them — floating around campus. They want IT to step in and devise a solution to improve the physical security of faculty and administration notebook PCs on and off campus. They also want to provide a secure method of authentication for students, teachers and staff when they access the school’s network. Please send a 500-word description of your proposed solution, addressing technology, policy and people in your response.

The Ed Tech editorial staff awarded the IT Pop Quiz prize to Robin Manke-Cassidy, technology support analyst, coordinator, for Arizona State University’s University Technology Office. In that position, she designs, implements and supports Windows Active Directory, firewalls, Cisco Clean Access, network connectivity tools such as virtual private network and OpenAFS clients, and network security. Manke-Cassidy’s university will receive a $2,000 shopping spree at www.cdwg.com. Her entry follows:

The Problem

Computers in the university environment, many of them unregulated notebook PCs, were infecting the network of one of the largest academic and research universities in the country, Arizona State University (ASU), with viruses and worms. IT reported as many as 6,000 security incidents a year.

Technology

ASU implemented a network access control solution — Cisco Clean Access — to help enforce security policies on student notebook PCs and computers and to prevent viruses and worms from bringing down the school network.

The solution consists of a self-contained, appliance-based Network Admission Control (NAC) offering, which includes a server to enforce security policies, centralized management capabilities and an optional thin client that can be added to user devices for additional security and control. These integrated offerings help address four key security issues: authentication, vulnerability assessment, remediation and repair, and centralized management.

Policy

ASU initially deployed the solution in the residence halls to evaluate all devices that attempt to access the network for compliance to internal security policies through network and device scans before access is granted. The IT staff was then able to place noncompliant devices in a quarantine area where thousands of student and faculty users can undergo automated repair processes, instead of burdening the overloaded IT staff.

People

• ASU students, faculty and staff are now able to inspect their Windows operating systems through files, services, applications and the registry, performing their own security problem repairs.

• ASU IT can ensure that machines entering the network have all the current operating systems, antivirus software and automatic upgrades, and that the systems are continually monitored to maintain this security.

Results

• ASU security policies are successfully enforced on all student machines.

• ASU has been able to reduce security incidents by more than 75 percent.

“Implementing the Cisco Clean Access solution has been a win-win [situation] because students get to repair the security problems in their computers and ASU gets a much safer network,” says Manke-Cassidy.