New Achieve IT Project to Address Campus Web Services

A new Achieve IT: Campus Web Services enterprise technology project will focus on improving web services for faculty, staff and students and web security for users and the university. Project teams are being assembled to work toward the Achieve IT goal of providing excellence in web technologies.

In the 1990s when the web was in its infancy, many universities offered faculty and students personalized web spaces to encourage experimentation with emerging online technologies.  Today, with increased growth and emphasis on social media, cloud storage and services, and mobile apps, demand for traditional university-hosted web spaces for faculty and student use has declined.

The Personal Content Publishing team, under the umbrella of the Achieve IT: Campus Web Services project, will investigate methods to align university-hosted web services with current student, faculty and staff expectations.  The team will also be charged with developing strategies to support the university in nimbly responding to future changes in user expectations for web services.

Improving security is another important Achieve IT: Campus Web Services goal. Data breaches in higher education and across the IT landscape have exposed personal information and resulted in the potential identity theft of tens of thousands of people. The Application Development Architecture team will investigate best practices for addressing system vulnerabilities associated with an aging web services delivery model.

The team, under the direction of Associate CIO Ron Neyman, brings together web developers and IT professionals from across campus to develop a modern web services architecture that secures systems, forms and applications. This team will ensure that a standard approach to collecting and accessing important university data through web pages is put in place to protect faculty, staff and students from identity theft and other misuse of data.

Ultimately, the work of the Achieve IT: Campus Web Services project teams seeks to:

• Provide students and faculty with 24/7 access to secure web technology that supports teaching and learning
• Offer the teaching and research community highly available and robust web and communication resources
• Meet the needs of staff in securely supporting the online business processes of the university
• Meet the expectations of the public seeking web resources from the university

Over the course of the Achieve IT initiative, other web services project teams will be assembled as necessary to meet the initiative's goal of creating excellence in university information technology services.

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