Information security at higher education: Information security management model proposal and implementation

Information security is very important for enterprises as well as for higher education institution. The research was conducted in order to make comparative analysis of security related standards/best practices and to propose an information security management model for higher education institutes. The literature has been reviewed. Common security controls and model?s components have been selected.A review study on standards/best practices and proposed Information Security Model for universities have been presented in this study. The goals of this model are to improve human factor which is the weakest link in security and to give easy to use instructions and tips for universities. This model is human and information centric instead of traditional models which is technology and information centric.A survey and control list has been developed for pilot study. Proposed model?s pilot study has been applied at the selected universities. The information has been collected by online questionnaire. Questionnaires have been transferred to SPSS for analyzing.The data collected has been analyzed by SPSS statistics package program. In data analysis frequency (f), percentage (%) and arithmetic mean have been used. In comparisons of user group and opinion of participants about information security one way variance analysis (ANOVA), Tukey and Dunnett C tests have been used. The survey shows that participants were agree to statements proposed such as ?information is a valuable asset and information security is really important for universities?. After pilot study the model and roadmap has been revised and finalized.It was concluded that this study shows that information security is important for universities and proposed human centric model would be easy to apply. This study also give details about different standards/best practices and commonalities of them and would suggest an easy to use model and roadmap for universities as well as other enterprises willing to improve their security. Finally this study could be inspiring other researcher about interpretating information security management model from the different point of view.Keywords: Information security, enterprise information security, higher education information security, IT security, information security standards, information security management model, security awareness.