This slide identifes the primary characteristics in an academic environment like a college campus, all of which have an impact on the IS infrastructure of the campus.

Large geographical spread: An academic campus has a culture quite different from that of a corporate environment. Many campuses are quite large, thus making policing of physical entry near-impossible. It is not unusual to have campuses exceeding 50 acres, with weak perimeter fencing. In a corporate environment, every piece of equipment which goes in and out can be monitored by security personnel.

Students and management share an adversarial relationship. In a corporate environment, employees and their bosses may dislike each other, but they both understand that their career depends on delivering on their jobs and following the corporate rules. In an academic environment, faculty make rules and students take pleasure in circumventing them. This makes implementation of any policy, including IT policies, difficult.

Rules are hard to enforce: In this environment, rules are hard to enforce by all parties subscribing to a set of common goals. Therefore, technology is the only solution to enforce rules. You can't ask students to comply with guidelines and hope that they will comply. If you put technological tools which make it difficult or impossible for them to break your rules, then you will get compliance.

Wi-fi enabled personal equipment: Wi-fi has caused special problems. The least expensive laptops today carry built-in wi-fi support, and these laptops are cheap enough for a lot of students to afford them. The network boundary is no longer restricted to the physical limits of the campus. It is perfectly simple for an outsider to access a campus network from outside the boundary wall if the campus has a wi-fi network without adequate controls. This was not the case even five years ago. Today, the bandwidth choke that a large college faces may well be due to outsiders using their bandwidth sitting outside the college campus. How would you know? Do you have the tools?

Huge downloads: Peer-to-peer download protocols are extremely popular among students to download MP3 music files, digital videos, ripped images of entire feature films, etc. Therefore, without proper controls, these will completely choke the institute's Internet links and also bring in worms and spyware.

Weak computer hygiene: In a student environment, computer hygiene is weak. A lot of the computers will be running insecure operating systems and will be owned by the students themselves. These cannot be controlled by the institute administration and will carry spyware, worms, etc. which will challenge the entire campus network's capacity due to illegitimate broadcasts. In a matter of hours, they will infect other machines and bring down the entire LAN. This is almost a monthly occurrence in campuses.

High turnover of students: There is a separate problem that IS administrators have to face in a campus environment. The rate at which students join and leave a campus is rare in the corporate world. In a campus, it is possible that more than a thousand students may join within one week at the start of the academic semester, and will need to be given user accounts on computers. Similarly, when students leave, each student's account will need to be deleted to avoid disk space leaks and security vulnerabilities. In most campuses, it's quite common to find that an ex-student's account is being used by existing students illegally to access inappropriate Web content and store pirated files. This becomes possible only because the IS administrators cannot track which accounts are to be deleted on which date.

Lean IT management staff: All these problems are compounded by the resource crunch that most institutes and universities face when recruiting personnel to manage their information systems. IS Departments are chronically under-staffed. If the institute finds a good administrator or manager, he leaves in a short time for more lucrative offers from the industry.