Information Security and IT Risk Management

CHAPTER 2 System Administration (Part 1)

Overview

As we stated in Chapter 1, the goal of information security is to protect information and information systems by ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. You have seen some examples of how security can be breached and the consequences of such a breach. Evidently, businesses would like to defend themselves and their customers. So, how can they do that? The rest of this book is devoted to answering just this question. This chapter introduces you to system administration, one of the core components of an organization's response to information security concerns. At the end of this chapter, you should know:

• What is system administration
• Why system administration is important to information security
• What are the general system administration facilities provided by enterprise software systems

Introduction

The overall information security response by an organization has many components including standard procedures, user training, and managerial accountability. All of these will be addressed in the appropriate sequence in this text. However, the first line of defense is the effort undertaken by system administrators to secure critical information systems. The system administrator is the person who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of a technology system.¹ Given the importance of information security for day-to-day technology operations, system administrators often also perform the role of system ...