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"We are administering accounts with just one staff person and one administrator." |
One of the world's largest private universities
Founded in 1875, Brigham Young University (BYU), in Provo, Utah, has grown from a small pioneer academy to one of the world's largest private universities. With a full-time enrollment of approximately 30,000 students and sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, BYU offers a unique educational environment that promotes learning by study and by faith.
Open networks: the key to maintaining educational competitiveness
In today's rapidly changing environment in higher education, attracting the highest quality students and faculty requires that educational institutions provide academic and IT services that are accessible, secure and reliable. In order to remain competitive, BYU needed to utilize technology to provide a more open environment for teaching and learning. However, openness also presents significant risks: security breaches or use of the university network for illegal activity (such as copyright infringement or harassment) can lead to lawsuits and liability, as well as penalties for noncompliance with student privacy and other regulations.
Improving system security, reliability and performance to meet educational needs
As the distributed computing environment became more complex, BYU was challenged to continually improve the security and reliability of its enterprise systems while maintaining a more open environment for teaching and learning. The goal was to achieve this without reducing performance or increasing personnel. As these challenges became cumbersome for staff members, BYU's Office of Information Technology recognized the need to streamline the processes used to monitor system security, and to manage user accounts and privileges. BYU chose CA because of their longstanding, strong working relationship.
Powerful, cross-platform security
CA worked with BYU on a security/vulnerability analysis to quantify its needs and identify where security improvements were needed. "We needed stronger, more flexible security and user management techniques," said Roger Goodrich, Senior Architect of Security and Administration at BYU. "We also needed to be consistent across different platforms."
CA utilized its expertise and its Security Solutions family of products to implement the solution, which began with compliance. CA "lets us know which servers are out of compliance and provides us with the necessary tools to correct the situation," Mr. Goodrich said. The next piece of the puzzle: access control. CA allowed BYU to lock down its servers, provide accountability for each user, and assign specific access rights.
To reduce the costs of managing the new security environment, CA provided an administration solution that "allows us to provide life-cycle management for user accounts," Mr. Goodrich explained. This solution "lets us administer access control accounts on servers by individual or by groups of individuals that have the same rights or roles. We administer roles with one process. We can then, for example, maintain the password criteria from one place for all authorized servers." Centrally administering user accounts translates into time and resource savings. "We are administering accounts with just one staff person and one administrator," he added.
Empowering state-of-the-art education while reducing risks
To compete for the best and the brightest students, Brigham Young University must offer the most dynamic educational experience possible — one that takes full advantage of the latest networking and online resources. CA implemented a cross-platform security and access management solution that enabled BYU to fulfill its educational mission while reducing risks of unauthorized access, network abuse and regulatory noncompliance.
CA's solution:
- Standardized security policies and procedures across the network
- Enables BYU to control access rights for each user on its network
- Dramatically increased the productivity of existing administrative and security personnel by streamlining administration
- Ensures all compliance problems are rapidly identified and corrected
By understanding the educational goals of BYU, CA was able to implement a security solution that enables it to deliver the educational infrastructure its students and faculty need, while reducing risk and improving system reliability and staff productivity.
Content posted on: 16 July 2007
