It's a matter of doing things that would be impossible to do without it. You have to log in, but you only have to log in once. I'm not sure how much it slows things down, but frankly I don't c are. And because of the savings the intranet provides, the financial cost of security is easily justified. Given the size of the Penn State community, that translates to roughly a penny a day per person-in ot her words, a bargain.
Somebody has to continually administer changes to allow new programs and protocols to get through.
Love says his company thought about using firewalls, then thought again. We had complete control of every machine th at was connected to the Net. That allowed us to configure them to the level of security we felt we needed. In fact, the company only recently began to put firewalls in place in its own accounting department. The precautionary steps that Love does use involve undoing things rather than doing them.