The Utah Security Summit was held in late January 2004. Two important action items came from that meeting. First, UEN took on the responsibility to assemble a list of Security Points of Contact for all Universities, Colleges, Districts, Regions and State Agencies associated with our statewide network. Second, to begin weekly conference calls that were aimed at providing an information and training exchange.

We held the first conference call on March 1, 2004. Today marked our third call. The key to success for these calls will be to encourage a free flow of information among all participants. Oh, and to provide an interesting enough forum to attract participants. That's extremely important, too. It seems that the discussion at the end of the call is more interesting than the official discussion.

We intent to spend an hour on the UEN conference bridge every week. The format is as follows:

9:00 - 9:10: Discuss the current network conditions.

9:10 - 9:20: Take feedback from other participants, share concerns, etc.

9:20 - 9:30: Provide a weekly training tip and discuss

9:30 - 10;00: Stay on the conference call fielding questions and facilitiating discussion.

Troy has also created a blog site in support of this conference call. The site is Utah SAINT. Currently it is available to anyone who is interested. Eventually we intend to populate this with network specific information and will likely restrict the IP space that has access.

A few weeks ago I was attending the StateNets conference with my boss, Mike Petersen. We were listening to a typical security presentation. You know the drill. Patch your machines, be careful with information, use strong passwords and change force changes, perform scans, use IDS tools, etc.

I leaned over to Mike and whispered, "You know, we are the only group I know of that is trying this Security POC, conference call thing." He whispered back and encouraged me to share that with the group. My response? I'd rather wait until next year to determine if this approach is successful or not.

It always worries me when I find myself doing something outside of the norm. And for sure the success of Utah SAINT and our weekly conference call is far from certain. It seems like a good idea. But the only way it will realize its potential and become wildly successful is through participation by a large segment of our peers throughout Utah. I hope for the best. And we will work to ensure the success. But we can't do it alone.........
10:04:20 PM    comment []