Everyone talks about hostile users….the occasional rogue employee…..but few System Engineers truly live that environment in the extreme. Imagine an environment with 6000 completely hostile users. Where every one of them is highly motivated to attack your systems, steal your data and just for funsies to physically destroy your equipment. Consider that in this environment the hostile users are your primary customer, the sole reason for your organization’s existence. You are not charged with busting them and having security escort them from the premises. In fact that isn’t even an option. You are instead charged with taking care of them, teaching them, and nurturing the natural curiosity that is the root of their hostile actions. Anything less; you and your organization are a failure. In this track we will discuss the challenges of a K-12 public school IT Department and how to leverage low cost/no cost common sense security solutions. Isolation of systems, simply patching, user rights, commonality of systems and configuration, vlans, switch port setups, web filtering….a host of items that most organizations lose track of that cumulatively are all you really need to be realistically safe.
Jim is a long time career System Engineer specializing in Microsoft and Cisco systems. He has spent the last 10 years in public education in a 12 building metropolitan campus with 6000 student users and 900 staff users. He is also the keeper of the Kennedy family photos, so you never know what might pop up on the next slide.