Initiative IX – Centralization

396 - Virtual and physical servers moved to the data center and 214 servers were decommissioned during centralization.

$100K - Amount invested in infrastructure for research as a result of centralization.

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United Front

Initiative IX highlights the advances made by UTech to centralize IT services and resources at CWRU. This is important because it allows UTech to reduce and effectively manage the risk profile of the university, leverage best practices and improve the overall IT experience for the campus community. These examples and stories also demonstrate how UTech is optimizing the university’s investment in IT:

  • After various audits and meetings, UTech completed the access control procedure with both CWRU Police and Safety and Facilities Support to ensure limited physical access to CWRU data centers.
  • UTech began an initiative to create a “Working Across Boundaries” program within the division to assess the integration of support services across campus. The program also is evaluating IT services on campus to explore possible collaboration and consolidation efforts—allowing UTech to gain staff efficiencies and improve services.
  • By transitioning the Windows and Linux server operating system patching from the Case School of Engineering to the Cloud Services team, duplication of efforts was eliminated in this important maintenance activity.
  • UTech developed a set of Dell hardware standards for staff on campus, resulting in a price discount as well as quicker delivery times.
  • A Google Suite support plan was created to outline a process to better manage all of the supported G Suite applications and important unsupported applications for the campus. The plan highlights the collaborative spirit of UTech, as the service managers and resolver teams include employees from across the division, including staff working within School-based UTech departments.
  • UTech’s VYVX Broadcast Fiber Services is a worldwide fiber network used for the transportation of high-quality, real-time video and audio. This connection allows CWRU to offer exclusive, one-on-one interviews with university researchers, experts and executives.
  • UTech’s Cloud Governance Committee continues to bring value to campus by addressing needs and requests while maintaining a secure and consistent campus environment. Several cloud features launched, including Google Team Drive, Google Drive Sync and Box Drive.

Success Stories

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UTech worked with multiple campus partners to integrate the university’s main room reservations systems— EMS (non-academic spaces) and Astra (University Registrar academic spaces)—in order to develop an easy-to-use, effective system.

Following the integration, users no longer have to toggle between applications and sort through un-collatable results. Updating class data from the Student Information System used to take more than an hour and was done once daily during the night; the integration reduced this run time to less than one minute and updates now occur every 45 minutes with the ability to be run on demand during peak times.

This project demonstrates how UTech can streamline processes and systems, eliminate redundancy, transition from local installations to hosted solutions and deliver better functionality to the university community while saving tens of thousands of dollars in the long run.

 

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Working with the Office of Student Affairs, UTech is handling the technical implementation of CampusGroups, which is replacing OrgSync as the university’s community engagement platform. Some of the many benefits include:

  • Reduce redundancy by replacing other, more expensive and less productive campus solutions
  • Ability to tie in the newly integrated room reservation system to a campus-wide events calendar
  • Easier assessment of the student experience
  • Better and easier to use mobile interface
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UTech’s MediaVision department provides AV equipment and assistance for events and rooms/facilities, plus full-scale video products, for the entire university community. In April 2018, MediaVision live streamed the Hudson Relays, a marathon relay race and an annual tradition on campus for more than 100 years. The production involved seven cameras, 2,000 feet of cable, integration of new signal technology and more than a dozen people, covering the entire campus. The stream was enjoyed by hundreds of people across the country and tallied more than 1,000 views.