Section 1: Situational Risk
As over 60% of the Novell servers deployed in the world today are deployed in the educational market, there is a large amount of situational risk, students in general particularly high school computer students are more prone to network attacks on there schools servers. Therefore Novell has a high risk factor for simple escalation of privileges attack, however the older the students get the less chance they will engage in these types of attacks. And in a professional deployment of the Netware platform this type of risk is 75% eliminated, the remaining 25% is a quotient of the workplace population that has computer experience and is again focused on escalation of privilege attacks. The majority of denial of service attacks on Netware servers is focused on the Educational community with the students being the perpetrators of the attacks in most cases.
Console Security
The risks of a perpetrator sneaking into the server room and executing a denial of service attack against the servers with a Novell environment greatly decreases with Netware as opposed to Windows or Linux, because of Novell’s unique features like imanager and Console1 that allow for the administrator to have very little actual time on the server console, additional physical barriers to the server can be put in place to prevent such occurrences. Also the absence of a user friendly GUI environment adds to the time it would take to execute an attack of that nature decreasing the risk.
Overall Risk Assessment: Educational Market
In a education or K12 Environment any type of server deployment is going to be a security risk, students present unique challenges to the way network security is delivered, Administrators cannot fully lockdown the students due to the fact they have to maintain a open academic computing environment, and a growing number of students are intent upon escalating there privilege levels, This leaves any deployment open to script kiddy type attacks. However in this case Novell can be a good choice due to its lack of easily accessible vulnerabilities and its high reliance on RSA security, thus providing a very secure first tier for a deliverable solution to any educational environment.
Overall Risk Assessment: Corporate Market
Deployment of Netware in any corporate environment is generally successful in terms of security, the solution is not easy to attack and there is far less risk then with a windows based solution. However due to Novell not being a native Windows OS and the large majority of clients connected from Client windows OS’s the built in security features of Netware are not enough to secure an environment successfully, for total security purchasing of Zenworks is necessary at additional cost.
