Documents Contributed by ECAR, Incident Handling and Response, and Key Findings

This document presents the key findings of the 2007 ECAR study, Shelter from the Storm: IT and Business Continuity in Higher Education. The study looks at IT unit readiness to foster and support the functioning of colleges and universities that are challenged by disruption. Responding to a well-documented increase of interest in business continuity and disaster recovery issues among higher education chief information officers (CIOs), ECAR designed the study to inform executives about how institutions approach continuity issues and to identify practices that are associated with good business continuity outcomes.

U.S. higher education institutions have historically enjoyed a culture of open access to information. The free flow of information faces increasing challenges as concerns about information security continue to mount. This summary of a study examines how higher education is coping with the growing cost of information technology security and with the tensions between preserving confidentiality, ensuring data integrity, and maintaining an academic environment in which information is easily available to authorized users.