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Network Security
Delivering Slices of Network Securely at USC
6/27/2008
When Richard Nelson's IT team at the University of Southern California's Information Science's Institute (ISI) decided to make an internally developed research administration application available to other groups on campus, it faced a unique security challenge: how to provide access to the program itself without also handing over broader access to other resources on its network.ISI, founded in 1972 as part of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is situated in Marina Del Rey, CA, about 23 miles from USC's main campus in Los Angeles. The research facility hosts a number of research areas, including natural language processing, artificial intelligence, grid computing, network security, sensor networks, hardware systems (including a chip fabrication facility), robotics, and biomedics.
The group that Nelson, the director of computing, leads at ISI primarily supports the general computing infrastructure at the institute: e-mail, business applications, networks, Web services, and desktop support. It also offers collocation services, which come in handy particularly for newly incubated companies that hatch from the research efforts.
The research groups themselves are mostly government funded through agencies such as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and National Science Foundation (NSF). They take care of hiring the technical staff they require for their specific projects.
In the year 2000, to ease the burden of administrivia for ISI and its research teams, the IT team conceived of an application that would automate the institute's financials, accounting, proposals, facilities, and billing operations. Called MyPortal, and in operation for three or four years, the system runs a set of Web services. MyPortal taps into corporate data on the university's systems for baseline information, such as how much money is in a particular account and what the year-to-date expenditures are. It integrates that with ISI's own data--project leaders, what staff people time is being charged to a given contract, when the contract was signed--to provide reporting and recordkeeping. That, in turn, is used by research teams in reporting back to the government agencies. "Here are the people working on this, here's what's spent to date, here's our progress," explained Nelson. "We're able to add that value added data and provide that in a format that the government needs."
The MyPortal system has proved interesting to other academic units on campus, said Nelson. "They may not be in a scientific discipline. But they find that, out of the box, MyPortal provides the capabilities for them to do the value-added recordkeeping they need to be successful as well." Recently, the
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