IT Security Week: 10-14 February 2014

Last week, we ran our first ever IT security awareness campaign in the University - IT Security Week (10-14 February 2014).  We ran this in conjunction with the University of Dundee. 

We had a special one-day event, targeted at staff and students - to raise their awareness of the dangers online - and give tips on how to stay safe.  We also invited students and staff from the Universities of Dundee and Abertay, St Leonards School - and Dundee & Angus College. 

The event was a great success - and I was delighted to see so many staff, students and visitors attend.  We had a great variety of speakers involved, to all of which I'm extremely grateful for taking the time to share their considerable knowledge and experience.  Having experts from all around the UK involved in our event was a critical factor to the success of our event. 

Speakers:

• DI Eamonn Keane, eCrime Unit, Police Scotland
• Duncan Atkin & Gavin Holt, 4th Year Ethical Hacking Course, Abertay University
• Martin Brown, Chief Security Portfolio Architect, BT
• Kenneth Macdonald, Deputy Information Commissioner, ICO
• Saleem Bhatti, Professor, School of Computer Science
• Helen Ridley, Client Manager (on behalf of Mike Loginov), Hewlett Packard
• Leona Forbes, Head of Product Solutions, brightsolid
• Mark Williams, Information Security Specialist, University of Dundee
• Steve Watt, CIO, University of St Andrews (Event Chair)

We've received great feedback.  The campaign highlighted the need for better education of the dangers faced online - every organisation needs to put this higher up the agenda.  This is something we're committed to. 

 a series of campaign posters were created

More IT Apprentices in the ITS team

 

Rebecca, Dhani, me, Matthew and Stuart

I was absolutely delighted to welcome a further four IT Apprentices to the IT Services team.  In 2012 we piloted the scheme by recruiting three IT Apprentices (on a two-year contract) and it’s worked extremely well.  Rebecca, Dhani, Matthew and Stuart joined IT Services in September 2013.  They are working in our Service Desk, Desktop and Media Services teams. 

These young adults get a great on-the-job learning experience, whilst receiving invaluable training and support from QA.  I very much hope that they enjoy their experience and relish the wide range of skills and experiences we can offer them. 

I’m particularly pleased we have recruited two female IT Apprentices as women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) areas. Scottish IT and digital businesses are struggling to fill job vacancies as a result of increasing demand, with over half needing to recruit from outside Scotland, (according to a survey from Scottish trade body ScotlandIS) so it’s really important we give these young people the best opportunity and training we can.  These staff will benefit from being supported and mentored by a wide range of very talented and experienced staff and get the opportunity to work across the full range of IT roles.

 

Datacenter Dynamics: 20-21 November 2013

Tomorrow I'm heading to London to the Datacentre Dynamics Conference and Expo at EXCEL.

I'll be presenting a case study - The University of St Andrews Data Center Consolidation and Virtualisation Project. 

My presentation will cover:

• some background about the University of St Andrews (located in a small fishing village in NE Fife!);
• the challenges I inherited back in 2010;
• how we've delivered our transformation agenda and ICT vision;
• BYOD ecosystem;
• our data centre build project
• and what we've achieved and how we measure success

The agenda for the day is packed - and look forward to hearing from a wide variety of industry experts. 

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conferences/2013/london-2013?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=London%20EB%20Deadline%202013

Gartner Data Centre Summit 2013

I am delighted to be delivering an end user case study entitled "Transforming IT at the 600 Year Old University of St Andrews" at the 2013 Gartner Data Centre Summit in London on November 26th this year.

In this session I will look at our journey over the last three years and how our data centre has played a key part in underpinning the transformation. I will also look at how both server and network virtualisation has improved the resilience, efficiency and availability of core systems and services.

Full details of the event can be found here  http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/emea/data-center/

Janet News Issue 22 - featuring IT Services at the University of St Andrews

https://www.ja.net/sites/default/files/news/Janet%20News%2022%20lo%20res.pdf
(see pages 16-19)

 
 
 
 

Please support Action for Children - sponsor me!

Did you know that each year in the UK:

§  100,000 young people are homeless

§  1 in 3 young people will attempt to take their own life

§  1 in 7 young people will be sexually abused

On Friday night (4^th October) I’m taking part in Byte Night to raise much needed funds for Action for Children - a charity who supports and speaks out for the UK’s most vulnerable and neglected children and young people.  Action for Children helps to prevent youth homelessness through early intervention by ensuring that young people across the UK are given the support they need before it's too late.
  

On 4^th October I’ll be ‘sleeping rough’  to raise awareness and funds for this great cause. 

Byte Night is the IT industry's annual sleep out in support of Action for Children. Each year hundreds of individuals and teams (including a team from ITS) from across the technology and business community spend a night exposed to the elements in a bid to raise sponsorship and awareness of Action for Children's work to help prevent youth homelessness.

So, the purpose of my blog is to ask you to sponsor me - PLEASE!    Overall, the events across the country hope to raise £1m.  

To sponsor me, please go to our fundraising page: 
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/StAndrewsITS

To find out more about Byte Night and the work of Action for Children, please go to:
http://www.bytenight.org.uk/

http://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/

Many thanks in advance for your support

 

Virtualisation and Consolidation

One of the larger projects my team and I are involved in at present is one to consolidate the University's IT estate. Like any large organisation the dependency on IT has never been greater and around the clock availability of key systems is now an expectation (but not always a reality - see my blog post re. Outages!). With many buildings and a wide range of servers our aim is to consolidate as much as possible and reduce the distribution of servers and storage serving users across the campus.
Being a University we will always have an elements of distributed equipment however where it makes economic sense to do so we will aim to provide the service centrally. Good examples of this are systems such as email, authentication, storage, network services, telephony, etc.

Not only are we reducing energy consumption but we are also reducing our carbon output. I was recently interviewed by Graeme Burton of Computing and the article was published in this weeks Computing and can be found at http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/feature/2291483/driving-down-costs-and-carbon-emissions-at-the-university-of-st-andrews