Higher ed helping shape national strategy for security of cyberspace

By Jayne Spencer

“Just as the higher education community has worked together in the development and use of information technology in research and education, it must now work together to ensure that the same technology continues to be secure and reliable,” said Douglas Van Houweling, president and CEO of Internet2.

“Over the past couple of years—certainly pre-9/11—the higher education community already had been working to better understand security problems on our own campuses,” said Michael McRobbie, vice president for information technology and CIO at IU. “There are some excellent examples of solutions to which the government and private sectors should pay close attention.”

McRobbie and Mark Bruhn, IU’s chief information technology policy and security officer, had met with and made recommendations to the staff of the White House Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office and were at Stanford for the draft’s release. The strategy announced by the White House points to IU as noteworthy for the formal authority granted to the central security office toward taking steps to improve and maintain the security of the university’s technical infrastructure, Bruhn said.

Cybersecurity workshops are being coordinated this fall by EDUCAUSE and funded by the National Science Foundation. The workshops bring together technology experts and campus leaders to identify effective security practices and policies and develop partnership strategies with the research community.

EDUCAUSE and Internet2 will disseminate the results of the workshops through extensive national and regional meetings, publications for IT professionals and higher education executives, and Web libraries.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/cyberstrategy-draft.pdf