Mark Bruhn, associate vice president for public safety and institutional assurance at Indiana University, 
oversees systemwide security in both the physical and digital realms. Even as campus functions like building access and emergency response become increasingly dependent on institutions’ information-technology infrastructures, physical security, and information technology remain administratively separate almost everywhere.

But at Indiana University, officials are nearly five years into an unusual experiment and they say it’s yielding good results.

The undertaking began when President Michael A. McRobbie set in motion an overhaul of the university administration, which included bundling systemwide physical security and information security into the hands of one associate vice president, Mark S. Bruhn.

He reports to both the executive vice president for university academic affairs and the vice president for information technology.

"When you are dealing with so many different sources of information and so many different offices that need to be involved in the response to a problem, there has to be a reporting structure that brings it all together," Mr. McRobbie says.

The changes mean that the university now has uniform response procedures—a tool kit, Mr. Bruhn calls it —that can be applied to cybersecurity and physical-security incidents alike.

"It is that structure that provides us with a huge amount of comfort because we know even if it is a one-off sort of incident, we have a structure that is amoeba-like enough that it can cover just about anything that can happen," he says. […]