How can stronger IT-business relationships benefit your work, your organization, and the wider world? Drawing on 30 years of IT experience, including at the School of Medicine, we’ll use anonymized case studies and a visual “string map” to illustrate how focusing on relationships can save time and cut costs. You’ll learn actionable strategies to enhance collaboration, improve efficiency, and foster innovation. We’ll also connect these improvements to the Wisconsin Idea, showcasing the broader impact of effective IT partnerships.
Tag: System Administration & Operations
Lessons Learnt from Upgrading a Legacy IICS Secure Agent
Join us for a deep dive on how a team of engineers, system users and a third-party vendor successfully navigated upgrading an Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) secure agent, prompted by an outage that occurred in early March. The server and its Secure Agent had not been upgraded for several years, leading to challenges and compatibility issues during the process. Learn how these teams came together to ensure a successful upgrade.
Presenters
Recording (with captions)
Recording (with audio description)
Making Digital Accessibility Work: Practical Strategies that Stick
Room 112
Creating truly accessible digital experiences takes all of us. In this session, you’ll discover how small, practical changes to your daily workflow can make a big difference. Learn how integrating accessibility into your routine can be simple, effective and sustainable—no matter your role.
Presenters
Recording (with captions)
Recording (with audio description)
Enhancing cloud security: From basics to advanced strategies
Virtual
As more data, applications and business components move from on-premises environments to the cloud, it’s crucial to understand and address the unique security challenges that arise. This session provides a concise overview of cloud security, starting from the basics and progressing to advanced topics. Attendees will gain a foundational understanding of cloud security principles and learn how to implement robust security measures in their cloud environments.
Attendees will:
- Learn the foundational concepts of cloud security, including common threats and best practices for mitigation
- Discover how to use automation for secure configuration in the cloud
- Understand the risk assessment process at UW Madison
- Recognize the importance of establishing security baselines in a cloud environment and learn how to implement them<
Presenters
DNS and you: A primer on website names
Virtual
In this session, we’ll dive into the world of Domain Name System (DNS), the crucial component that translates human-friendly website names into machine-readable IP addresses. We’ll explore the fundamentals of DNS, what it is, and how it works, and discuss UW’s policies and practices surrounding DNS. Participants will gain a better grasp of the inner workings of the internet and be equipped with knowledge to troubleshoot and manage DNS-related issues more effectively.
Attendees will:
- Gain a foundational understanding of what DNS is and how it functions as the Internet’s address book
- Learn about the hierarchical structure of domain names and how they are resolved into IP addresses
- Discover the DNS policies and procedures specific to UW–Madison
- Acquire practical skills to determine where a website is hosted using DNS tools and techniques
- Develop an appreciation for the importance of DNS in the smooth functioning of the internet and its relevance to their daily online activities
Presenter
Operations at the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC)
Room 313
The Infrastructure Services Team in the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) manages computing clusters for researchers, maintains services for the national cyberinfrastructure and distributes software for global research communities. This talk will explore what it takes to manage CHTC’s more than 1,300 servers, support global research communities, and advance state-of-the-art, High-Throughput Computing.
Attendees will:
- Learn about CHTC’s mission and research areas
- Discover how to collaborate with or learn more about the CHTC
- Gain insights into CHTC’s technologies and operational models
Presenter
Keynote – Using our voice to create inclusive and accessible technology designs and services
Conference Session
The Zoom session will be live captioned by the McBurney Disability Resource Center. Link to the captions.
The YouTube live stream button is a go.wisc redirect that will go live no later than 8:30am on June 2nd.
Keynote Description
We, as IT professionals, play a critical role in designing, developing, and supporting the digital campus. We have created and evolved the digital campus over the last forty years, and in 2020 it became the primary mode of interaction for our communities. What can we learn from the rapid pivot to online, and more importantly, how can we evolve our thinking and approaches?
Let’s discuss how we can use our expertise and our voice to create digital spaces where people can thrive. Using ideas from fields such as critical design practices, conflict management, and polarities, we will explore the most effective approaches for providing spaces where multiple voices are empowered, and diverse communities can thrive.
The session will be interactive.
Opening Remarks for the conference will take place from 8:45-9:15am
Keynote Speaker Information
Image from The Harvard Gazette.
Jupyterhub in AWS for Instruction: It’s only temporary, unless it works… – Live Session
Conference Session
Description
Our presentation covers an overview of how a partnership between CS and CAE has been providing instances of Jupyterhub notebooks for instruction over the past several years. We will discuss how we have implemented the notebooks using AWS, structured load balancing and integrated with Canvas courses. There will be some demos of the tools we’ve used including terraform, helm and an alternating pair of A-B AWS instances for production and testing environments. We will conclude with a brief chat about future work items we are still figuring out and look for discussion with the community about best practices.
Familiarity with the concepts of cloud services, AWS especially, would be very helpful. Some familiarity with the concepts of containers and CI/CD pipelines will also help.
Attendees will become (more) familiar with cloud resources, learn about innovation in instructional support, discuss when projects take off at the university and stop being “pilots”. They will also learn about ways that people can work across various units in the university and facilitate inter-departmental cooperation.
Presenter Information
Original Logo from Wikipedia Commons. Image created by Mandy Morrow.
Stuck in Limbo: Struggles and Successes with MS Graph API for Automated Email Access into O365 – Live Session
Conference Session
Description
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a large place, with many staff members. One of the struggles that is familiar to many is how to balance specialized needs for divisions, colleges and other groups inside the university, with the administrative goals of simplifying services at a central level. In particular, email transmissions that are handled by software without the intervention of human hands can struggle when modernization occurs: the need for multi-factor authentication and deprecation of POP/IMAP protocols conflicts with services run by groups such as the college of Engineering.
My presentation goes over the journey I made as the sysadmin for a ticketing program that needed to be able to fetch and send emails through O365 as a computer — not a human that could perform multi-factor auth. I will discuss the basic layout of the way that I solved the issue, point out some pitfalls that arise because of the University’s bureaucracy and hierarchical structure, and offer some tips for others trying to write middleware in the trenches.
My audience will understand this better if they know the underlying mechanisms of emails and how they’re sent or accessed, as well as Office 365 authentication mechanisms.
The key takeaways are that writing middleware or API layers at the University can be quite difficult and challenging, but given the right circumstances, also successful. Another thing to learn is that challenges are almost never purely technical in nature, a lot of obstacles that come up are going to include tasks that take people-knowledge and social skill in the workplace. An appreciation for the wide variety of business needs among campus IT will be emphasized strongly.
Presenter Information
Image Licensed under Creative Commons Zero.
Development, Security and Operations Working Together for UW Madison – Live Session
Conference Session
Description
When specialized IT fields – Development, Security and Operations – work together, they can solve problems that separate departments many not be able to handle. The process looks different from each perspective. Yet it is teamwork and respect for people with different skill sets that strengthens the UW IT community and keeps technology growing to meet the needs of the University and beyond.
Presenter Information
Image by Raphael Brasileiro from Pexels.