Campus IT at FH Kiel — fresh wind and fresh ideas

Introduction of the Cygna Power Broker Management Suite

The Kiel University of Applied Sciences was founded in August 1969 through the merger of several state engineering schools and advanced vocational schools. However, looking back through the history of its predecessor areas, it can reflect on a tradition of over 100 years.

The campus of the University of Applied Sciences is located directly on the Förde. Fresh wind comes free of charge here, and fresh ideas are an obligation. With over 6,700 students (winter semester 2012/13), the Kiel University of Applied Sciences is the largest university of applied sciences in Schleswig-Holstein. High-performance, innovative, regionally anchored, and internationally oriented. Those who want to study here can choose from a wide range of subjects. Approximately 35 bachelor‘s and master‘s degree programs, additional study programs, career-accompanying, and further education offers from the following departments are available. The central location is the state capital Kiel, and another location is in Osterrönfeld near Rendsburg. 

In this configuration, the Campus IT of FH Kiel is the central service center for IT infrastructures and services in the field of information and communication technologies. It is responsible for the hardware and software provision and the further development of the required IT, network, and telecommunications infrastructure of the university. This includes central server, data backup, and authentication services, as well as the central supply of email, content management, and e-learning. Therefore, it deals with the central IT basic services for the infrastructure (IT networks, internet, mail) and administration (HIS/ QIS, personal data management - IDM), which are centrally managed by the 11 employees of Campus IT. In total, about 7,000 users (employees and students of the FH) have to be managed.

For functionality and security reasons, FH Kiel has set itself the task of establishing an audit-compliant administration of Active Directory with backup and restore. Previously, regular backup of the Active Directory was carried out via its own backup procedures. This method did not meet the requirements. Through suitable measures, it should be made possible in the future to quickly, easily, and without disturbances restore data that has been accidentally deleted or lost. In the working group of IT officers of the state universities and research institutions in Schleswig-Holstein (ITSH-edu), which deals with topics of information technology for the universities in Schleswig-Holstein and meets regularly for this purpose, this AD topic was discussed with the goal of developing a joint solution.

After the initial conversations, the Cygna software was made available for testing purposes by N3K in August 2012. The test proceeded as planned, and after extensive tests, it was found that the functionalities of the „Auditor“, „Recovery“, „Privilege Explorer“, and „EventVault“ modules are precisely tailored to the needs of FH Kiel and the software is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use. The few minor handicaps that occurred during testing were quickly and uncomplicatedly resolved, with the FH Kiel staff able to fix the problems (in some cases after consulting with N3K) themselves.

The products have been in use since the testing phase and leave nothing to be desired. The goal of establishing an audit-compliant management of the Active Directory with backup and restore functionality was realized in the shortest possible time and has been running without incidents from the start. The transition from the test environment to the production environment also proceeded without any problems. N3K‘s support was rarely needed even in this phase, and when it was, it usually involved minor discrepancies, such as functional restrictions in some subnets, which could be resolved immediately. After a brief initial introduction by N3K, FH Kiel opted not to have additional training since the operation of the modules is consistently self-explanatory and intuitive.