With that in mind, look at the decisions you've made about security and decide what you think your system security goals should be. That may not be the policy that your site ends up with, but it's an important.

The second step towards putting together a working security policy for your site is to determine what everybody else's security policy is. What do the users and managers expect security to do for them? What do they think of the way security is handled currently? What are other computer facilities doing and why?

Every site has at least one security policy. The problem is that most sites have more than one; perhaps as many as there are people involved with the site's computers. Sometimes this proliferation of policies is purely unconscious; different computer facilities within the same site may be doing radically different things without even realizing it. Sometimes it's an open secret; administrators may be trying to maintain a security policy that they believe is necessary, even though the user population does not agree with them. Sometimes it's out-and-out war. Generally, people think of universities as the main place where computer users and computer administrators are engaged in open security warfare, but in fact many companies spend large amounts of time fighting about security issues (for example, administration and the engineers are often at odds).