CDW Case Study Sample

Scott Pinkerton is the communications infrastructure department manager at Argonne National Laboratory, a multipurpose Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory based in the Chicago area. Pinkerton has firsthand experience managing network security from the inside out while coordinating involvement between departments and business units.

“Our biggest [security] challenges are being nimble and agile while adapting to varying threats and risk,” he says. “At the same time we’re trying to develop a holistic strategy, building in deeper levels of integration and situational awareness.” When Pinkerton and his colleagues started looking at cyber security back in 1999, everything was driven by the network port numbers. “We were leveraging network flow data,” he says. “We were doing that to help us figure out where our servers were and which ones were intended to service the Internet at large and which ones were intended to service our lab community.

“We came up with an architecture — featuring a color coding — with different network categories that allowed us to identify different server roles in terms of who they communicate with. It was all about knowing the networks and the service ports.” Today, however, the mantra for cyber security at Argonne Labs is “Know thy data.” “It’s becoming harder for us to know what data is on which machine and which one might contain private information, such as Social Security numbers and credit card information,” Pinkerton says. “Our current go-round of rearchitecting, based on where our data resides, is definitely more of a challenge. We want to take a more collaborative approach to all these problems.”