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<
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Extension uses SharePoint in Office 365 as a robust, modern Intranet for program collaboration, administrative communication, and business workflows.
In 2019 Extension merged with UW-Madison, which required transitioning all IT infrastructure including our SharePoint-based intranet. An aggressive timeline and minimal campus support of SharePoint in Office 365 made for an exciting project. We will discuss how we migrated from a legacy on-premises SharePoint server farm to UW-Madison’s Office 365 SharePoint Online tenant, the compromises and improvements we made, and the relationships with DoIT that we built.
Attendees will learn potential ways to leverage SharePoint in a large school/division, tools and techniques for managing SharePoint migrations, and working with SharePoint with minimal DoIT support.
Do you find yourself swimming in a sea of form requests? At UW-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies, we certainly did – and we turned to Salesforce and FormAssembly to bring order to the chaos. With some simple Form Assembly set up we were able to automate the creation of campaign and case requests in our Salesforce CRM. You can too!
You will learn how to utilize partner solutions (Form Assembly forms tool) to streamline of routine requests through automation.
This new project builds on our existing campus VoIP telephone network and video conferencing software licenses to address the critical need for additional hybrid conference rooms. The standardized equipment in each room eliminates the need for participants to set up AV equipment in meetings and creates a simplified joining experience. Touch screen controllers allow in-person participants to connect to meetings using MS-Teams, Webex, Zoom and Google Meet. Over 60 hybrid conference rooms are being installed on campus this year, fostering inclusive meetings between remote employees, guests, and in-person conference participants. Departments can get started by requesting a consultation at https://it.wisc.edu/services/custom-audiovisual-conference-room/
