Security Engineering Lessons Learned for Migrating Independent LANs to an Enterprise Environment

Transition from small, independent LANs into larger enterprise managed infrastructures is becoming more prominent in academia, business and government. Consolidation of IT resources into larger, more disciplined, and more professionally managed environments has significant advantages however they do bring their own unique issues to solve in order to make the transition for the organizations involved easier. The topics covered under this paper are critical areas of concern organizations and their administrator staff needs to consider and resolve in order that transition and migration can be as painless as possible. Loosely using NIST SP 800.53 controls as a reference, the areas presented within this paper include access control mechanisms, patch management considerations, the need to address difference in hardware and software monitoring, baselines and licensing.