Security and Network Personnel
The security administrator should not report to the network administrator, because
their responsibilities have different focuses. The network administrator is under pressure
to ensure high availability and performance of the network and resources and to
provide the users with the functionality they request. But many times this focus on
performance and user functionality is at the cost of security. Security mechanisms commonly
decrease performance in either processing or network transmission because
there is more involved: content filtering, virus scanning, intrusion detection prevention,
anomaly detection, and so on. Since these are not the areas of focus and responsibility
of many network administrators, a conflict of interest could arise. The security
administrator should be within a different chain of command from that of the network
personnel, to ensure that security is not ignored or assigned a lower priority