Information Technology Services

Currently, UMass Worcester, UMass Lowell and UMass Dartmouth point of presences (POPs) have been at least partially upgraded. UMass Boston and the two MITI core locations will be completed in FY2008. Once all the router upgrades are completed, it will allow us to better segregate and control traffic flows.

Internet bandwidth utilization continues to rise. Since Fall of 2005, MITI's internet usage has doubled from 300 Mbps to 600 Mbps to date. Internet2 usage has remained fairly steady since 2004, with 155Mbps of bandwidth currently available to the research community.

The University has leased space in a carrier hotel in Worcester, which is used to host applications for various customers. Some customers host large mission critical applications on their own equipment in the space, such as one of the State and Community College's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) function, one of the State's Regional Library Consortiums, and other specialized applications such as video conferencing and streaming.

UITS maintains the server operating system (OS) and applications for other customers. For example, we host email for Bunker Hill Community College, Framingham State College, and Mass Community College's Executive Office, which translates to over 30,000 email accounts. UITS also maintains and supports the UMassOnline (UMOL) servers and online learning applications.

Emergency Notification Services

The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University demonstrated a need for colleges and universities across the country to provide rapid notification to their campus committees should emergencies or urgent situations arise. The University of Massachusetts took a leadership role in response to a request from Governor Patrick and the Board of Higher Education to create a better communication structure for all Massachusetts public higher education institutions incase of an emergency (Board of Trustees Strategic Priorities).

The University worked in collaboration with the state and community colleges, the Board of Higher Education, and the Commonwealth's Chief Information Officer to acquire a rapid notification service. The service provided will best align with the needs of the majority of the University's constituents across the 29 campuses and the University President's Offices.

UITS led this engagement in collaboration with the CIOs from each of the five campuses and the Internal Audit Department at the University. The overall objective of the exercise was to deploy industry experts to survey the University networks and systems and ensure that all appropriate information security controls were implemented across the University as dictated by industry best practice. This assessment provided the University with a detailed report of all vulnerabilities detected along with an assessment of the associated risk levels and a recommended remediation plan for each vulnerability reported. The engagement summary will be utilized by the University as the roadmap for addressing all vulnerabilities.

University Security Cabinet - Ongoing Oversight of Security Challenges

UITS continued to lead the University Security Cabinet in the ongoing effort to identify and manage the ever evolving risks posed to our networks, systems, and data. Each of our campuses faces the same challenges and the Security Cabinet serves as the clearing house for identifying new risks and reviewing potential tools and services that could be deployed to mitigate those risks.

The goal of the Cabinet is to foster collaboration and to identify a common approach for addressing risk across the University. To that end, the Cabinet recommends enterprise level security tools and the need for new or revised policy at the University, as needed.