Gadgetman: Studying I.T. in real companies – Security Issues?

I am continuing my post graduate studies this semester, and one of the papers I am doing is ‘Networks and Protocols’. I managed to get hold of the assignment requirements early and finding the first assignment was a report on a real company to be chosen by the student, I thought I should make a head start and ask the company I currently work for. However this threw up an interesting dilemma. One of the requirements for the report is the company is large enough to have their own I.T. department, which is not that hard to find, but it does mean that companies this size usually have a good grasp on security and their networks and don’t want this kind of information to be in the public domain. Speaking to one of the managers I found he had the same questions; how do institutes such as universities deal with issues like this when the subject matter is, by definition, key to a companies I.T. infrastructure and exposing that information could possibly expose the company to outside attacks? Luckily for me I did get permission to use this particular company but I still had to convince two managers. Has anyone else had similar problems? How did you deal with it? I know that the ‘backup’ plan for this paticular course is to use a case study available to students, but that means the student doesn’t get the advantage of speaking to and learning from other people.