[mbreese]

Stanford gets attacked - a lot. The biggest threat to the network is personally owned machines that need legitimate access to the network. The only way for them to protect the rest of the network is to have some kind of monitoring on those personal machines. The only other alternative would be to run personal machines on a separate network entirely, which they may or may not do already. I'm not sure. And BigFix doesn't cover only students, but also all faculty and staff as well.

Honestly, if you think that's bad, try getting a server online (in the datacenter!). The network admins take their firewall rules very seriously (as well they should).

For me, the biggest pain is the two (yes, two) backup services that must be installed for my department.