ITS Service Changes
How Ongoing/Upcoming Upgrades May Affect You
Below is more detail about ongoing and upcoming changes to ITS services that are likely to impact you:
- New Service: UVa Box Cloud Storage Debuts
- Oracle/Mercury VPN Service Retirement
- ITIL: ITS Implements Incident Management Processes
- Security Update on UVa’s DNS Servers: DNS Recursion Remediation
- ITSWeb: ISPRO Website Moving to Virginia.edu
See also recently completed ITS service changes/upgrades and Student Information System (SIS) Enhancements put in place at the request of users.
New Service: UVa Box Debuts
UVa Box Cloud Storage (Summer 2013)
- Purpose: UVa Box will address a long-standing need for cloud-based
storage of University files containing non-sensitive or moderately sensitive data. This service
will provide current UVa faculty, staff, and students a secure, Web-based file storage and
collaboration platform that is available anytime, anywhere.
- Box is part of the Internet2 NET+ Services program that provides services to Internet 2 member organizations, including higher education.
- Impact:
- This will be a free service for current faculty, staff, and students.
- It will be available beginning in mid-June.
- Each user will have a storage quota of 50 GB.
- UVa Box is offered for storage of University-related files containing non-sensitive or moderately sensitive data, not files containing highly sensitive data.
Oracle/Mercury VPN Service
Retirement Project (July 2013)
- Purpose: The purpose of this project is to bring network access to the Oracle Applications Suite up to University standards for the protection of highly sensitive data. This requires migrating existing Oracle password-based VPN users to 2-factor VPN authentication. The Oracle/Mercury VPN Service is scheduled to be retired in July 2013.
- Impact: Current users of the Oracle/Mercury VPN will receive UVa Identity Tokens and can start using the JointVPN service. A current list of users needing UVa Identity Tokens is being finalized. A more detailed email will be sent to Local Support Partners (LSPs) with information about installing software and distributing tokens to users identified in their departments over the next few weeks. For questions about the project, contact secnet@virginia.edu or see the Getting Ready for the End of the Oracle/Mercury VPN Service webpage.
ITIL: ITS Implements Incident Management Processes
New Framework in Place to Guide Restoration of Operations after Service Interruptions (April 29, 2013)
- Purpose: In coming months, ITS Enterprise Infrastructure and
Enterprise Applications (EI and EA) will implement several new internal processes based on the
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®),
a compilation of international best practices for IT service management. ITIL Incident Management
will be first; in the future, ITS EI and EA will implement Change Management and Problem Management
best practices based on the ITIL library as well.
- ITIL’s formal definition of “incident” is: An unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in quality of an IT service, or the failure of a configuration item that has not yet impacted a service. ITS has customized ITIL’s Incident Management processes for UVa, outlining a standardized framework of internal procedures and identifying how we will restore normal operations to impaired or unavailable services as quickly as possible with minimal impact to our users in the University community.
- Specifically, incidents will now be classified internally on a scale from 1 to 5. Incidents determined to have a high level of Impact and Urgency (i.e., when a Critical Service goes down) will be ranked P1, while incidents related to non-critical services will be classified as P2. Incidents affecting single users will be ranked as P3-P5, depending on several criteria. This internal classification system will dictate how ITS staff respond to service outages and the timeline for response. By ranking incidents and implementing corresponding Incident Management practices, ITS now has specific sets of procedures in place for responding to incidents of each level, and these are aligned proportionately to an incident’s impact and urgency.
- Impact: As Incident Management practices based on ITIL® are
implemented, the University community will see an increase in predictability, reliability,
and transparency around the outages of IT services provided by ITS EI and EA.
- Specifically, Incident Management will reduce downtimes due to incidents; reduce recurrence of incidents; and ensure more frequent, detailed, and direct communications (via ITS System Status and a new “Incident Information Line,” [phone number: 982-6500] providing a periodically updated recording of information during P1 incidents).
- End users need not do anything differently because of this change; continue to contact the UVa Help Desk when you encounter a technical issue, as always. These new processes are internal. But over time, they will increase satisfaction with the quality of ITS services by more quickly resolving and communicating technical incidents, whenever they occur.
Security Update on UVa’s DNS Servers
DNS Recursion Remediation (March 19, 2013)
- Purpose: UVa will update its Domain Name Service (DNS) servers to remove a security vulnerability. After March 19, UVa’s DNS servers will restrict DNS lookups to clients with UVa-issued IP addresses, and will no longer permit others on the Internet to resolve IP addresses into fully-qualified domain names. ITS and ISPRO are closing this security hole to bring UVa’s DNS server behavior in line with standard procedures at most major universities and to prevent denial-of-service (DOS) attacks across the World Wide Web that appear to be originating from UVa.
- Impact:
This change only affects users who have ever manually entered the UVa DNS
servers into the network settings of one of their devices (such as a home router or computer).
This change will not affect internal UVa network users.
- If, after March 19, access to non-UVa websites has stopped working (i.e., non-UVa hostnames do not resolve) on an off-Grounds device, then the device’s network configuration will need to be changed to restore access.
- ITS recommends such users change their network configuration settings to use their Internet Service Provider’s DNS servers; contact your ISP for assistance.
- If you have questions, please contact the UVa Help Desk.
ITSWeb: ISPRO Website Moving to Virginia.edu
Information Security, Policy, and Records Office (ISPRO) Info Moving to www.virginia.edu (March 7, 2013)
- Purpose: Previously, most of the information security and policy, and access management pages were on its.virginia.edu (ITSWeb), while the Records Management site was on virginia.edu. Now all ISPRO information will be housed on www.virginia.edu.
- Impact: Users do not need to do anything. Visitors to a page on the
previous site on ITSWeb will be automatically redirected to the parallel page on the
new ISPRO site on virginia.edu.
If you have bookmarks set to the ISPRO pages, you may want to update them as you have the opportunity, but rest
assured the redirects will work for an extended period.
- ISPRO is also rolling out Facebook and Twitter presences. You can Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @UVaISPRO for the latest news in UVa information security, policy, and records.
- If you have any problem with the new website, please click on the "Maintained by: ISPRO" link in the bottom left corner of each page, or email us.
