What Happens When You Look At Your University’s Web Estate?
Implementing a process to discover websites, record key site/server data and monitor an entire web estate not only mitigates risks, but also lets higher education institutions make evidence-based decisions and changes. Changes that benefit students, faculty, staff and other site visitors alike.
Web estates become unruly because websites accumulate. Absent website lifecycle management to cull or retire old sites, fragmented and autonomous web development leads to constant website growth.
Taking a hard look at entire web estates, using exhaustive discovery methods, will uncover thousands of IP addresses and hostnames to eventually be winnowed to hundreds or even thousands of individual sites and micro-sites.
Finding every site is a huge task. One much better treated as a process than a project.
Furthermore, as implementing effective institution-wide website risk management can take years, web governance rollouts need to be supported by continuous website monitoring processes, rather than one-time snapshots.
Next - Why do higher education institutions become concerned about their web estates?
