Security cannot be overemphasized in today’s world. As technology professionals, we used to make security recommendations and then balance those with the demands of our administration’s dated and flawed workflows. In recent years, security tools and models have evolved to respond to the ever-changing landscape that evolves daily. It is no longer acceptable to sacrifice security for an easy office workflow, but these solutions do not have to come at the expense of other budgetary needs.
This session will address these ideas and discuss efficiencies that can be found elsewhere to help make the return on investment evident to budgetary administrators. In this session, attendees will learn how Cedar Crest College addressed the challenge of establishing secure connections between its SIS and other resources that its employees require access to, and how that happens. We will discuss our structure and strategies that other institutions can use to implement a secure environment for their data workers, regardless of their location at any given time. We will discuss hardware, software, remote access solutions (VPN/SASE/RDS), and how these tie into both hosted and on-premise systems implementations. There is an assumption that attendees have a basic understanding of how client applications access their own resources. This session will begin by discussing the way workstations connect with and communicate with College resources. It will then discuss the challenges of connecting to and accessing the data they need, when they need it. We will then talk about the challenges that we faced coming out of the pandemic and addressing the new paradigm of remote work being an expectation and not an exception. We will discuss the differences between traditional VPN connectivity and SASE zero-trust connectivity. Tools and configurations will be discussed surrounding SASE/SGN clients, VPN clients, firewalls, and other necessary tools to create a high-performance, secure structure for information workers to work within.