This summer, equipped with feedback from the community and our IT partners, NYU IT undertook a review of current and potential projects to develop a strategy for the new fiscal year. This is always an exciting and difficult undertaking—exciting because we look ahead to new initiatives and efforts, and difficult because we have to balance what we want to do with the resources available.
This year, NYU IT will be leading over 40 projects and initiatives and supporting another 40+ business projects. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to highlight some of our projects and key initiatives in Global Infrastructure and Operations (GIO), Global Office of Information Security (GOIS), Institutional Solutions Group (ISG), Research and Instructional Technology (RIT), and User Success, beginning today with cybersecurity initiatives in the GOIS portfolio.
Global Office of Information Security (GOIS) Projects
- Develop & Implement Global Information Security Policy & Regulatory Compliance Framework project will set minimum university-wide cybersecurity policies and standards, and ensure that security practices are consistent across the University, underscoring our shared responsibilities in protecting sensitive data and our network, systems, and applications.
- Plan & Implement Network Access Control (NAC) Identity Services Engine (ISE) Solution project will help protect NYU’s network from malicious activity by preventing unauthorized users from accessing internal networks, and ensuring that devices attempting to access the network meet minimum security standards.
- Enhanced Risk-Based Network Segmentation project will implement additional controls to separate systems with different security needs, particularly those areas of highest risk, to help contain and/or reduce the impact of malicious activity such as a malware outbreak.
- Plan and Implement MDR (Managed Detect Response) Services project will provide faster and more consistent detection and response to threats to our infrastructure, systems, and critical assets, and implement proactive security solutions to manage internal and external threats and reduce vulnerabilities. To help meet increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, Endpoint Management Endpoint Security (EMES) software should be installed on all NYU-owned computers to manage configuration of endpoints and support patch management, software deployment, and hardware selection.
- Privileged Access Management (PAM) project is a critical security control that enables NYU to simplify how we define, monitor, and manage privileged access across our complex global IT systems, applications, and infrastructure. This project will support security, compliance, and audit requirements, and increase the protection of systems and applications, by managing access to production environments and logging user activity.
- Log Management/SIEM Expansion project will enhance our Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) system and improve log management for all key production systems, which will help meet minimum compliance requirements and facilitate troubleshooting and forensics, when needed.
Project Management & Governance Update
As of FY23, the NYU IT Project Management Office (PMO) will begin transitioning to initiatives that are complex in size, impact and risk and away from work that is operational, repeatable- and does not require a large governance overhead. The determination of what would be managed by the PMO will be a collaborative decision in partnership with Don and the CIO Directs, while balancing the resources available.This change is designed to improve processes that didn’t strike the right balance between value and effort and better align to project management industry standards and NYU’s governance model. To support this transition, the IT PMO is providing PMO Lite Training on October 17 to anyone who is interested. Finally, I’d like to mention that these emails are now being archived in the newly-launched CIO Insights blog. Thank you for reading and for helping me continue to strengthen the connections between all IT administrators across NYU.