Thursday 11 April 2013

Equality and Security

Yesterday I had a catch up with the other leads in our Equality Objectives Project together with some colleagues from HR and Simon Fanshawe who is advising us. Some good discussion on training for managers in equality issues, particularly around policy implementation, and giving people the confidence to use the policies fairly and consistently. We also looked at data, what data we held, where the gaps were and how we could improve it, especially on the staff side. We're doing a lot of work on staff recruitment, and have started to turn our attention to student recruitment. Equality ad diversity issues obviously overlap a lot with widening participation, but they are not the same. One of the issues we keep coming back to, is the importance of the question "why?". Why do we want a diverse workforce, why do we want a diverse student population. Summed up nicely by Simon as Diversity trumps Ability every time.

Today I've been in London at a RUGIT meeting where a significant amount of the meeting was spent discussing cyber security issues. We had speakers from the CPNI, who gave a very interesting and informative overview of where they felt the high risk data in Universities is, which is mainly in some research areas likely to be targeted by intelligence agencies. We had already asked our Security SIG to have a look at their 20 critical controls and how they might be applied in a University environment. There was general agreement that very few of them could be applied across the board, but were relevant to high risk areas. We also had a look at how some Universities were handling mobile device management, and discussed our relationship with UCISA.




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