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2020 Q2 Quarterly Review

 

By

Letter from the CIO

Headshot of J. Michael Barker, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Security Officer
J. Michael Barker, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Security Officer

I invite you to read Information Technology Services’ Quarterly Review. It captures a sampling of activities from roughly February 2020 through June 2020. Though I have grown tired of the phrase “these unprecedented times,” I find myself reflecting that today not wearing a mask outside of one’s home seems more awkward than wearing one; I find myself wary of people who seem too casual about maintaining physical distance; I find myself feeling somewhat unsettled on excursions from home. At the same time, I find myself energized by the prospects of crucial changes in society and fascinated at the strength of character and clarity of expression of so many people to admire.

While the world swirls around us, Information Technology Services has sought to respond to the shifting needs of our colleagues and our community. We have also sought to provide information technology services that form a bedrock upon which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can operate — in varied ways among varied contexts. We have sought, too, to stretch our services and staff to be more flexible, more compassionate, and more forward-thinking.

You will read about projects and services adapted to and spawned by the pandemic. You will read about routine operations you might never have known to occur. You will glimpse how Information Technology Services’ day-to-day work blends into its preparations for the coming months and years. You will see that notwithstanding the swirling world around us, our work continues.

J. Michael Barker's signature

 

Multidivisional

ITS helps with open-meeting solution

Keeping the University running requires safe ways to hold meetings that are open to the public, like the Board of Trustees meetings. ITS was asked to help the University provide something better than just a phone conference.

ITS’ers who helped were Brad Held, Chelsea Porter and Sarah Arnold from the Digital Accessibility Office; Jordan Adams from Teaching & Learning; Mark Wampole and Leslie Kreizman, providing support in the South Building; and Kim Stahl, working with vendors. They collaborated with campus stakeholders to identify, practice and document a solution for the BOT and for other open meetings that integrates with four different cloud services.

The result was a great meeting environment on Zoom for the participants and safe-from-a-distance accessibility for public participants.

Providing expertise to Heroes Health Initiative

The COVID-19 crisis has significantly impacted the overall wellness of frontline professionals across the healthcare spectrum from sanitation to outpatient care. The Heroes Health Initiative, led by the UNC School of Medicine’s Institute for Trauma Recovery, empowers healthcare workers by giving them access to vetted mental health resources directly on their mobile phones and tracks collective mental health across institutions with reporting and dashboard infrastructure implemented in Google Cloud Platform. Making this possible has required expertise across ITS, including Infrastructure & Operations, Digital Services, User Support & Engagement, the Information Security Office, and Research Computing.

The app is available in the Apple App Store and the Android Play Store. The initiative officially launched June 14.

Boosted VPN capacity

ITS created a secondary VPN service to support the increase of students, faculty and staff working remotely due to COVID-19. The secondary VPN, which did not replace vpn.unc.edu, can support thousands of new clients.

Meanwhile, Communication Technologies’ Networking unit upgraded and expanded the capacity of the existing campus Cisco VPN service. The old VPN could support 10,000 users and 2Gbps. The new VPN can support 20,000 users and more than 10Gbps.

CommTech’s Danny Shue and Information Security team members John Allison and Michael Williams researched expanding the capacity. The group leveraged existing licensing and available bandwidth using the on-campus firewall service. The staff members tested a VPN client from Palo Alto Networks on firewalls already in use on the campus network and worked with the Service Desk to develop ITS’ ability to support this service’s use by the wider University community. More than 4,500 lines of code were reviewed.

Tech resources helped students adapt to remote learning

As the pandemic unfolded and disrupted the Spring semester, one way in which ITS supported students was by sending out information about where to find certain resources that aided in remote learning, such as how to access Zoom, Microsoft Teams and VPN.

Supporting the implementation of Marketplace

ITS teams in Enterprise Applications, Infrastructure & Operations, User Support & Engagement and the Information Security Office have been supporting a strategic initiative for Carolina to replace the existing punchout using eProcurement in PeopleSoft with Coupa’s Cloud Solution.

Coupa was chosen in May 2020 after a lengthy RFP process in which ITS played a key role.

Scheduled to launch in August, the new system will improve the shopping experience. With Marketplace, users will be able to shop all suppliers simultaneously, enabling better selection and the most competitive pricing. Currently, users can shop only one vendor catalog at a time. Procurement wants to have more than 60 suppliers instead of the current 26.

Also, the new system will lessen the burden on Procurement and ITS to support the punchout process. ITS spends hours nearly every week supporting issues. The Marketplace system will require maintaining and supporting just one connection with Coupa. The existing system requires maintenance of 26 separate sets of code and firewall-related rules.

Upgrading virtualization service

The Global Systems Infrastructure and the Networking teams are working together on a virtualization upgrade project to increase the networking bandwidth available to the VMware and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) infrastructure.

The planned network upgrade will increase the platform’s ability to move large amounts of data seamlessly between servers, data centers, a backup destination or the public cloud.

ITS has continued to improve the service since launching ITS server virtualization in 2007. Two notable improvements came from the 2018 purchase of NetApp SSD drives, which increased the speed of storage, and the 2015 UCS purchase, which consolidated the infrastructure to help centralize and scale.

First designed to save money and reclaim data center floor space, the virtualization service is now an enterprise class on-premises cloud. It supports all ITS major services as well as more than 30 campus units. The service provides 6,000 vCPU, 30 terabytes of memory, nearly one petabyte of virtualized storage and 1,800 virtual server guests.

People

J. Michael Barker was selected as UNC-Chapel Hill’s Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, effective February 1.

User Support & Engagement

CRC adjusts operations to protect on-site staff and customers

On June 1, the Computer Repair Center was one of the first ITS groups to return to working on-site following its March suspension of operations due to the pandemic.

Ensuring safety for staff and customers was the top priority. Operating from a large space enables staff members to easily keep six feet apart. Two technicians and one administrator operate from the center at a time. Staffers work one week on-site and two weeks offsite to prevent the entire staff being exposed to the coronavirus simultaneously. Customers must book appointments.

The CRC worked closely with the Service Desk to get back into users’ hands the machines that were already repaired when the pandemic quickly halted operations in March. For those students who graduated and moved on while their CCI machines remained with the CRC, the group shipped those computers to their owners. Customers who had borrowed loaner equipment mailed those devices back to the CRC.

Service Desk’s new leader redesigns operations amid pandemic

When Assistant Director Ingrid Camacho took over the leadership of the ITS Service Desk on April 1, she took on her new responsibilities in the face of a pandemic. Right away, she led the group in redesigning how it operates and serves customers.

The biggest challenge was in-person walk-in support. Those staff members didn’t have much experience doing their job remotely. In preparation, the staff trained on handling chat and web tickets and ServiceNow queue management. Managers provided documentation and schedules, further helping staffers with their transition.

Shifting walk-in personnel onto chat and web services had an unexpected benefit. Naturally, the Service Desk served a larger than normal number of requests for help with connectivity tools such as VPN, Zoom and Microsoft Teams during the campus community’s first two weeks of remote work. In all, the Service Desk handled 3,293 requests in the first week and 2,577 in the second week. An average week is 2,200 requests.

What’s striking is that the Service Desk was able to significantly decrease the wait time for phone support from the first week to the second week. For the first and busiest week, the phone average wait time was three minutes, 27 seconds, which is still fast especially since the University was in the early days of adjusting to a pandemic. By the second week, the Service Desk dropped the phone average wait time down to one minute, 15 seconds. That’s pretty much the normal wait time.

Digital Accessibility Office supports remote operations

Early on during the pandemic, the Digital Accessibility Office team members quickly retooled their operations to serve the campus community’s needs for online learning, teaching and working.

DAO employees switched to conducting video meetings and training from home and formed new partnerships and supported campus members in new ways. The DAO helped the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor’s commissions figure out how to conduct open meetings via video conferencing. The team also helped ensure that these meetings would have captioning functionality. The DAO also supported preparations for an all online orientation for incoming first-year students.

Loaner laptops distributed

Several ITS staffers distributed 25 loaner laptops to faculty, staff and students in need on March 20 and March 25. They provided laptops from Managed Desktop Services and Computer Repair Services stock to 10 faculty members, eight staff and seven students. The staffers held 26 total appointments in 15-minute increments. Most of the borrowers made their requests through an online request form. The on-site team never hosted more than one customer at a time in the building; text messaged each customer when it was their time to enter the building.

MDS adopts virtual drop-in hours via Zoom

Managed Desktop Services established virtual “Tech-in” hours through Zoom to provide in-the-moment technical support services for its customers and for ITS. MDS found this to be a great opportunity to reconnect with its user communities. Many zoomed in to ask questions or troubleshoot issues while others stopped in just to see and talk with colleagues.

DAO offers self-service scanning tool

The Digital Accessibility Office began offering Siteimprove to make it easier for UNC-Chapel Hill staff and faculty to improve the accessibility of their own websites. One of the DAO’s most anticipated, helpful tools in its toolkit, Siteimprove is an easy-to-use website accessibility scanning tool. The software evaluates how accessible websites are and shows how to make them better. Website owners can improve and track accessibility and content issues using its robust report and dashboard features.

Webdot website cleanup

Digital Services conducted its annual web.unc.edu website cleanup and identified and removed abandoned websites. The group deleted 260 websites that were older than 90 days and not updated since their creation and identified more than 2,000 websites that had not been updated in more than a year. In addition to needing to serve as good stewards for the University, Digital Services also wanted to ensure that it is hosting only what is needed as the group prepared to move WordPress to the cloud.

Digital Services helps with pandemic-related sites

Digital Services has supported some quick website launches and worked closely with other teams in ITS, like Middleware, to ensure that the University’s websites, especially the Keep Learning site and coronavirus updates, stay online and functioning as expected.

ServiceNow pipeline program created

The IT Service Management team developed a four-week-long pipeline program to address its struggle to hire developers to implement the growing number of departmental requests for more ServiceNow features. The team trained volunteers from Carolina’s IT community to create ServiceNow experts on campus.

ServiceNow updated

The IT Service Management team made a variety of changes within ServiceNow:

  • Reduced its use of Remedy and began moving Jaspersoft reporting to other platforms. The licensing costs savings aligns with the University’s strategic goal to operate more efficiently.
  • Improved knowledge management by creating a consistent view of a knowledge article, updating user feedback options, setting an expiration date and notification for knowledge articles and adding new fields to the article to improve the accessibility and management of the article
  • Created new service requests and updated existing service requests to make them easier to use
  • Provided robust reporting within Tableau for fulfillers, with help from Enterprise Reporting & Departmental Systems
  • Changed service requests to support remote teaching and working for IT units across the University
  • Released portfolio and project management module into production and made available to campus groups that are interested in using this capability
  • Upgraded ServiceNow to the latest version New York release, which was the first major upgrade since implementing ServiceNow

People

  • Kate Hash was named ITS’ Assistant Vice Chancellor for Customer Experience & Engagement, which encompasses User Support & Engagement.
  • Ingrid Camacho took on oversight of the Service Desk upon the retirement of Sharon Glover.
  • Theresa Silsby, Director of the ITS Business Systems Help Desk, was elected to the Employee Forum.

Stats

Between March 16 and June 21, the ITS Service Desk fielded more than 30,000 inquiries via phone, chat and web support.

Infrastructure & Operations

Neither snow nor pandemics close the Operations Center

For almost 30 years, the ITS Operations Center has never closed its doors for any reason, and it wasn’t going to for COVID-19 either. It is one of the few ITS groups that has maintained its campus presence since the pandemic began.

“That’s more than 27,000 consecutive shifts without closing — snow, hurricanes, pandemics — we’re still here,” said Neil McKeeman, ITS Operations Center Manager.

Early in the pandemic, on-site monitoring was especially important as ITS focused on smoothly transitioning to remote work.

To protect their health while working on-site, the Operations Center staffers go above and beyond. Two-person teams work staggered shifts. They skip their former routine of hopping over to the hospital cafeteria to grab some food.

They also take on small but meaningful tasks that help other University employees stay socially distant off of campus.

Oracle upgrade will advance automation

Infrastructure & Operations has begun efforts to upgrade the University’s Oracle software to a newer version. The upgrade, which is expected to be completed by November, will monumentally change the way ITS configures the infrastructure of Carolina’s databases.

With the updating of Oracle to the 19c version from 12.2, ITS introduces automation. Automation will make it easier for Infrastructure & Operations to implement security updates in the future and to minimize the probability of errors.

Automating Oracle upgrades will also reduce the number of employees needed to run testing comparisons in the future, freeing up time to focus on more valuable tasks. The Infrastructure & Operations team hopes that automation will soon be widespread for many processes. Groups across ITS, in fact, are examining possible new resource-saving opportunities through automation.

The Oracle 19c update requires updates to PeopleSoft. The automation ability of Oracle 19c will roughly cut in half the time to update PeopleSoft, to three and a half months from six months.

People

In an ITS News story, Brenda Carpen, Project Manager with Infrastructure & Operations, and her family shared their experience with shifting to remote. The family members discussed the adjustment from their perspective — all from the same household — as a University staff member, professor and administrator, and as a student. The move to virtual working, teaching and learning has been a mixed bag, they found.

Stats

  • The ITS Franklin data center power usage efficiency rating improved from “not efficient” to “average” with available power at 60% while the ITS Manning data center is rated “efficient” with available power at 50%. This indicates sufficient capacity for additional customer server infrastructure in either location.
  • New application infrastructure automation practices now allow for efficient database upgrades to be completed in 15 minutes, down from two hours.
  • A re-architecture of Infrastructure & Operations’ enterprise backup solution resulted in the Oracle PeopleSoft databases to be recovered more quickly — in eight hours from a previous timeframe of seven days.
  • Reorganized Oracle databases to enable faster patching cycles and fewer interruptions to the business by 75%.
  • A campus collaborative effort between Infrastructure & Operations, 23 departments and retirees resulted in the effective utilization of resources and one of its cloud platforms via the migration of 1,380 active home directories from the old MyFiles service to the Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive service.
  • Infrastructure & Operations performed extensive optimization and tuning of its disaster recovery cloud backups service, reducing costs by 40% ($60,000 annually).
  • A partnership between Infrastructure & Operations, the Information Security Office and campus IT leadership enabled a rapid deployment of a new security tool to 17,000 campus user endpoints in a matter of hours, leveraging a unified configuration management solution.

Enterprise Applications

Providing crucial support amid pandemic

Enterprise Applications team members quickly adapted to support the University’s ever-changing needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The division’s pandemic-related efforts included implementing changes in ConnectCarolina to support a new grading basis specific to pass/fail options, notes for official and unofficial transcripts about COVID-19 grades, refunds on ParentPlus loans, and changes to class fees for Carolina Courses Online summer classes.

More recently, Enterprise Applications has been helping the Office of the University Registrar and a University-wide subcommittee on the planning and logistics for classes to be held with new social distancing guidelines in place. This has required testing multiple scenarios (distance between individuals in classrooms, different times between classes, different start and end times for class days, etc.) to identify what Fall schedules will look like for students and faculty.

In support of HR and payroll, Enterprise Applications has worked closely on many adjustments from tracking Communicable Disease Mandatory Employees to adjusting straight salary pay to enable critical operations workers to get a temporary supplementary hourly rate for working on campus during the University’s partial shut-down.

The team also has assisted with dining refunds, parking refunds for students, and a temporary stop of parking deductions from paychecks.

Upgrading TIM

Enterprise Applications, Payroll and Infrastructure & Operations team members have been working on upgrading University’s TIM system to the latest version of Kronos software. This major upgrade will move Kronos Workforce to version 8.1 from version 6.4 in October 2020. The upgrade will remove the need to use Flash when users access TIM, will enable improved reporting from TIM over time, and will facilitate a later implementation of mobile for TIM.

Testing began in June.

Rolling out a new app for scheduling events and rooms

Enterprise Applications has been collaborating with groups across campus to roll out a mobile-friendly scheduling application that will enable users to check room availability and schedule events.

Unlike other scheduling tools used by the University, the 25Live tool will succinctly list all events in a single system. Having one system is especially important for University crisis management and will improve safety. As another benefit, 25Live increases the ability to run scenario tests. Testing will be an especially important feature for campus groups to have this fall to accommodate social distancing.

The Carolina Union will be the first group on campus to try out 25Live. The second group to roll out 25Live on campus will be the Office of the University Registrar in the fall. Once the 25Live project is stable for the Union and Office of the Registrar, the project team will begin introducing other campus groups to use the software.

The Enterprise Applications employees who were instrumental in the project include Holly Harmes, Rebecca Jones, Julie Dockens and team lead Cynthia O’Daniel.

Launching a talent management system

Enterprise Applications has contributed significantly toward the University’s implementation of a comprehensive talent management system, called Carolina Talent.

The system will place greater emphasis on employee management of their own career and professional development, improve efficiency in recruiting and onboarding of new employees and provide an easier interface for performance management and reviews. It also will enhance UNC-Chapel Hill’s capability to grow leaders and high-potential employees and prepare the workforce to meet ever-changing demands.

Five primary modules are planned for implementation. The first, learning management, is scheduled to go live in late July. The other modules are recruiting, onboarding, performance management and offboarding.

Building award management system

Enterprise Applications is building an award management system, called Project Notifications, in PeopleSoft for OSR audit requirements. Enterprise Applications is working with OSR, ORIS and campus departments that manage projects within the system.

Various projects throughout campus are managed in this system and updates or changes are recorded in the system. Each time a change is made that impacts funding, the managing department, or the duration of the project, a PDF email notification is circulated to the managing departments for reference.

Improving financial aid process

Enterprise Applications has been analyzing and making changes in ConnectCarolina to support the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid’s key strategic initiative to process financial aid packages earlier than previously done and develop automation where possible.

This strategic project will enable OSSA to provide students and families with the most accurate and timely information. Currently, admitted students receive their aid package after their admission decision is released. The implementation of early processing will allow families to assess financial aid packages while considering admission to UNC-Chapel Hill. Further, automation of processing and re-processing of packages will increase efficiency, decrease potential errors, and provide more time for potential students to see package adjustments.

Teaching & Learning

Provided early support amid the pandemic

Teaching & Learning was at the forefront of the University’s COVID-19 communications from the very beginning.

In March, Teaching & Learning collaborated with the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE), the Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS), Carolina Office for Online Learning (COOL), University Libraries and the Office of Instructional Innovation to create the Keep Teaching website.

In addition to creating helpful online resources, Teaching & Learning was one of the main providers of faculty training and support. The group led classes that focused on teaching faculty how to use Zoom and Sakai to continue their instruction. Several staff members from Teaching & Learning also provided support by addressing questions faculty posted in the Zoom training chats and help requests.

The Zoom classes had 590 total attendees and “getting started in Sakai” had 327 attendees. In total, some 1,516 faculty members participated in the March 12-18 training sessions.

Suzanne Cadwell, Director of Teaching & Learning and the UNC Zoom service owner, stayed in close contact with Zoom to discuss UNC-Chapel Hill’s security concerns and set up additional security settings on the UNC Zoom account.

The team led several training sessions focused on summer school classes in mid-May.

People

The Teaching & Learning team was nominated for the Efficiency & Innovation Governor’s Award for Excellence.

Communication Technologies

Improved institutional Wi-Fi mobility

Communication Technologies and UNC Health are improving institutional mobility.

CommTech has brought UNC Health’s Skynet wireless network to virtually all of the UNC School of Medicine. UNC Health, meanwhile, has deployed UNC-Chapel Hill’s eduroam network to most spaces within its hospitals and other buildings.

When UNC Health employees enter the School of Medicine buildings, their mobile devices can continue to connect to Skynet. Likewise, the mobile devices of UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, staff and students now can enjoy eduroam within much of UNC Health’s property.

The two institutions integrated parts of their wireless and network hardware with each other to provide continuity of services between UNC Health and the University. The project is especially significant for the technical cooperation and trust that the two closely related but separate institutions demonstrated as well as the visibility of the benefit to numerous users.

CommTech had sought to complete its work by August or September. Instead, CommTech completed 90% of its part of the project ahead of schedule — in early May.

Keith Miller and Danny Shue were the leads in this project.

Completed large relocation of campus fiber

The Transport Operations unit within Communication Technologies completed one of its largest relocations of campus fiber in more than 15 years.

The team had to tear up the duct bank and move all the fiber underneath the S1 parking lot behind the Public Safety building before site work begins in September toward construction of a power generation plant. UNC Health will use the 12,000-square-foot power generation plant to provide additional capacity to UNC Hospitals during emergency conditions and critical infrastructure necessary for the Surgical Tower project currently in construction.

The duct bank contained as many as 1,000 strands of fiber and served as a main fiber artery. The fiber cables that traversed the duct bank tied two of the three data centers together — between the Phillips and ITS Manning data centers and between the ITS Manning and ITS Franklin data centers. Many of the connections on those cables are ones that keep the campus network up and running.

The last time CommTech’s Transport Operations team had to move such a huge fiber hub was in the first couple years of this century in preparation for construction of ITS Manning, which opened in 2007, and in 2005 when the original Chase dining hall was demolished to make room for the Student & Academic Services buildings.

Transport Operations spent half the year planning and preparing for the fiber relocation. All the active fiber links that were on the fiber cables in the duct bank had to be identified and moved to other cables. Then the team went into the manholes and removed the cables over the course of several nights. At the end of June, the team finished moving the fiber to a new span of duct bank on the west side of the construction area.

Upgraded to new version of network operating system

In an extremely large effort, Communication Technologies’ Networking team migrated all of campus to network operating system Aruba OS 8.5.0.8. The group had been attempting to upgrade to version 8.X for more than two years without success, due mainly to firmware bugs or other issues that staff discovered in testing.

Progressing on providing cheaper connectivity to remote sites

Networking has completed testing on a pilot to bring campus network services to remote sites that do not have a metro LAN connection back to campus. This new technology enables remote sites to use business class ISPs — a far cheaper option than metro LAN connections — and connect back to campus for campus wireless and switching capabilities. Jerry Woodside and Len Needham are working on a project to convert about five sites to this new technology in the next quarter.

Deployed latest generation of Wi-Fi access points

Communication Technologies is now deploying Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) as the standard model of access points across campus. This sixth generation of Wi-Fi is the latest industry standard for wireless networks. CommTech has enough inventory of access points to continue life cycling 200 series access points with these 500 series access points for at least another quarter.

Upgrading network connectivity

Communication Technologies is upgrading the network connectivity for the infrastructure that provides core services for much of campus. Networking has constructed new dedicated pods in ITS Manning and ITS Franklin that will provide 40Gbps edge connectivity for heavily utilized resources such as the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and storage. These resources can routinely saturate their 10G uplinks, which can cause issues and outages for services. Each pod will be uplinked to the spine at 4x100Gbps. Networking expects servers to begin using this new infrastructure in the next quarter. Jerry Woodside and Reid Bradsher are co-leads on this project.

Improved fiber at the Smith Center

Over nearly two weeks, Transport Operations upgraded and improved fiber at the Smith Center. The Smith Center did not have enough fiber, and some fiber had deteriorated. It also had no multimode fiber connecting to the campus networking equipment.

Replacing VoIP phone system

Toward the phased project to switch the campus to the AT&T system from the existing Verizon Business, Communication Technologies’ Voice Services unit began in June pushing out new firmware to Mitel/Aastra VoIP phones (all phone models). More than 16,000 phones will be updated. Porting over from Verizon will take two to three years.

Networking is supporting the project by configuring and testing connectivity to the service, specifically staffers Chris Florio and Danny Shue.

People

Hiawatha Demby, Applications Analyst, retired after more than 30 years of service with the state.

Stats

April – June 2020

Networking sent (uploaded) more data to the internet than it received (downloaded).

Wired

  • Number of switches on campus: 2,879
  • Number of ports: 173,397
  • Peak download rate: 10Gbps (June 15)
  • Peak upload rate: 19Gbps (April 17)
  • Traffic sent to internet: 3.5 petabytes
  • Traffic received from internet: 1.7 petabytes

Wireless

  • Number of APs on campus: 10,022
  • Peak concurrent connections: 6,500 (June 23)
  • Devices onboarded to eduroam: 11,990
  • Top onboarded operating system: iOS, at 46%

Enterprise Reporting & Departmental Systems

Assisted Operational Excellence

Enterprise Reporting & Departmental Systems team members assisted with the University’s Operational Excellence project to launch the salary dashboard and accompanying data literacy resources for HR officers in June. The tools were developed in collaboration with OHR, OIA, ITS and employees across campus. ERDS team members led the effort of preparing a historical view of salary data to enable campus units the ability to look at longitudinal trends based on categories such as gender, ethnicity and academic rank, among others.

Security Privacy & Identity Management

Expanded security awareness

The Information Security Office has made significant progress in expanding the University’s security awareness training since introducing a new training module in 2019.

University compliance was 4% at the beginning of this effort. As of February — before the University focus shifted to adjusting amid the pandemic — compliance had grown to 51%. At that point, all members of the IT Executive Council (ITEC) had been enrolled plus the School of Medicine, the College of Arts and Sciences and ITS, which was first used as a platform to test the initiative.

By pacing the strategic rollout, the Information Security Office was able to lessen any impact on the Service Desk. Enterprise Applications helped the campus successfully transition to the new training module by enabling supervisors to view training completions and passing scores within ConnectCarolina.

Dennis Schmidt, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Security Officer, worked with Security Operations and Incident Handling team lead Charlie Mewshaw to communicate directly with University IT leaders about the security awareness training. This helped encourage compliance. Explaining the trainings to the IT leaders gave them time to relay the importance of the program to their respective departments, which helped ensure that messages requesting completion of the training module were taken seriously.

To improve University-wide compliance, the Information Security Office reached out in additional ways to communicate security awareness. The Data@Rest podcast series, hosted by Mewshaw and Network Security Team Lead Michael Williams, has boosted awareness. Before the pandemic, Information Security’s SecurityCON, other in-person campus events and Mewshaw’s and Schmidt’s phishing presentations to campus departments also helped get the word out.

The security awareness training has been a positive community initiative to protect the privacy of personal and University data.

Upgraded campus firewall

The Information Security Office upgraded the campus firewall (Fluffy PAN), with support from Communication Technologies’ Networking group. The Fluffy PAN firewall protects networks and clients that are on main campus. The change involved migrating between different models from the same vendor.

Research Computing

Launched Open OnDemand

Research Computing implemented an open-source web portal, Open OnDemand, for Longleaf, the University’s flagship computing and analytics cluster. OnDemand makes the data and analytics capabilities of Longleaf significantly more approachable to new communities of students and researchers.

OnDemand provides interactive sessions on the Longleaf cluster with popular graphical user interfaces such as Matlab, R Studio Desktop and Server, Jupyter, SAS and Stata, and with tools such as FreeView, Pymol and GaussView.

Because these programs run directly on Longleaf, one needs only a web browser. This reduces software installation, configuration and maintenance requirements for end user devices and provides centralized high-performance storage across all these environments.

One of the interactive apps in OnDemand is a Linux desktop running on Longleaf, presented to users via their web browser. The Longleaf desktop is an excellent companion for large-scale computing and analytics. While command line skills are still required, students are considerably more accustomed to the productivity enabled by a graphical desktop for housekeeping and orchestration of their research codes on the cluster.

In conjunction with the implementation of OnDemand, Research Computing enlisted help from ITS Communications to create a poster and logo to promote the offering.

Deployed additional Secure Research Workspace

Research Computing deployed seven new Secure Research Workspace enclaves for both individual projects and departments, enabling them to work with regulated data.

Interest increases for Longleaf patron nodes

Research Computing has received increased interest in patron nodes for the Longleaf cluster. Clients recently purchased Patron Nodes for researchers in such schools and departments as Kenan-Flagler Business School, Computational Biology, Genetics and Mathematics. One patron node was purchased for a UNC-Greensboro faculty member.

A “patron node” is a way to reserve a section of Research Computing’s resources for one’s exclusive use or one’s team. It is a node (or collection of nodes) in Research Computing’s Longleaf that is purchased directly by a project, grant, faculty or non-ITS staff and access is controlled by one person (Principal Investigator, or PI). This is a dedicated computing space reserved for use by a small number of users. Unlike general cluster access, users on a patron node do not share the resource with anyone other than their teammates.

Client details valuable assistance

Juan Carlos Caro, a UNC-Chapel Hill doctoral candidate through the Health Policy Management Department of the Gillings School of Public Health, worked with ITS on a customer case study shortly before the pandemic. He detailed why he became a client of Research Computing in the winter of 2019 and how Research Computing helped him.

Caro had large data sets with assessment information about the entire population of students enrolled in public schools across Chile. He needed help with translating these data sources to create a web application dashboard that could display a map and comparative metrics and thereby communicate his research with relevant communities.

Research Computing helped make the technology user-friendly and appealing for a potential user. Specifically, Research Computing helped Caro with process steps on Git, Python and Longleaf, and with the website design. Caro also used Research Computing’s supercomputer to process the large data sets. The result was a fully automated web product with a GitHub open repository that can visually display the data aggregations and can be used as an iterative, continuous tool for researchers and policymakers on a global scale.

Research Computing, in turn, can use the project as a teaching position for either faculty or students who want to learn how to extract data from Python, or make web applications that highlight the data.