Committee Meeting - December 11, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
December 15, 2014

Present: 

Dave Kibble (acting chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Bruce Campbell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart

Guests:

Mike Patterson, Shawn Winnington-Ball

Regrets:

Dave Wallace (Chair), Andrea Chappell, Paul Miskovsky, Jason Testart

Agenda

  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, January 8, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Symantec Endpoint Protection (Mike Patterson)

Mike Patterson presented on End Point Protection. Topics included:

  • Overview
  • Malware attack vendors
  • Antivirus effectiveness
  • Key defense strategies
  • Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) to System Centre Endpoint Protection (SCEP) project
  • WNAG EP subgroup
  • What has ISS-SOC been doing?
  • Questions for CTSC
  • Final thoughts

View the full presentation on Endpoint Protection.

Comments & discussion

  • This is a high-visibility issue; sending out emails with viruses reflects poorly on the institution.
  • We can continue with Symantec after March 31st May 1st (corrected date); we just have to come up with 3 competitive quotes first.
  • Disappointed that that this has been left for so long; contract expires on March 31, 2015 May 1, 2015.
    • Really disappointed to hear that IST might have preempted the process by installing SCEP on 200 workstations already. There was very little communication of this to others including CTSC.
      • 150 or so of the workstations were labs that didn’t have any endpoint protection, the rest were IST workstations for testing purposes.
  • Reporting in SCEP tends to be better than SEP.
  • Are you aware of what other Universities are doing for endpoint protection?
    • A survey was done at CUCCIO a year ago; of the 20 respondents, 3 were using Microsoft and 2 were using Symantec. The leaders were Sophos (5) and Trend (4).
  • Is the WNAG subcommittee the group to look at this? Is CTSC willing to relinquish their control over something like this?
    • The subcommittee group consists of: Mike Patterson (IST), Mike Cocker (IST), Manfred Grisebach (IST), John Mayall (IST), Greg Parks (IST), Nevil Bromley (Arts), Lowell Williamson (AHS), Bernie Rutter (ENV), Hon Tam (ENG), Hari Chotara (Math), Steven Markan (representing both Science and IST). The Library and FEDS will also be asked if they’d like to have representation.
  • Symantec will continue operating after it expires on March 31st May 1st (corrected date) but we cannot add any more servers to it.  
  • Feedback from this committee would be appreciated in early January.

IT Best Practices (ITBP) Closure Report (Shawn Winnington-Ball)

Shawn Winnington-Ball presented the closure report on the IT Best Practices project. Topics included:

  • Agenda
  • About the ITBP project
  • ITBP Highlights
  • The process
  • Three areas of focus
  • Lessons learned
  • Next steps

Comments & discussion

  • What is the outcome/deliverable of this project?
    • Several documents have been created that include workflows and lots of definitions.
  • The project started out with good intentions, but our goals could have been more clearly defined.
  • It would be interesting to hear from Laurier how ITIL is working there; they did a talk at WatITis last year on it.

View the full presentation on IT Best Practices project closure.

Chair’s Remarks

Members were invited over to EC2 for a tour of the new IST office space; the tour took place following the meeting.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting held on November 27, 2014 were accepted as distributed.

Roundtable Reporting

Computer Science (Bill Ince)

  • It looks like we will be getting admissions information in OAT, which would be very useful.
  • Is anyone else experiencing issues with Quest re: logging in multiple times?
  • How will the machine room be used in the new EC5 building?
    • Would be good for research.
    • Sharcnet is exploring moving into that space and ideas have been floating around about how to use the rest of the space.
  • Science has been working on something called MarkBox, which is similar to CrowdMark, but has some nice features with it.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • There was an OAT meeting recently; some good progress is being made on the security front. It continues to be solidified and improved as a campus resource. 

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on January 8, 2015 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.