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Information Technology
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Status Report: Information Technology

April 2024- September 2024

Mike Schmidt, Matt Perna, & Jennifer Oxelson

Executive Summary

Our role is to maintain and enhance the productivity of the staff and assist with the resolution of issues in service to the community.  Primarily, that consists of keeping end-user and developer systems secure, and keeping servers and services highly available, patched, and operational for the community. This report is informational and there are no pressing issues.

Questions for Immediate Committee Feedback

Unless committee members or the community are experiencing performance issues that we could help resolve, no other feedback is requested.


Major Activities

As of writing this, we have implemented 2 MDM solutions to manage our Macbooks as well as our remote Windows clients. Firewalls, antivirus, and overall configurations are monitored constantly and report back when there is an anomaly on both Operating systems. Cloud backups have been implemented on all Unidata client workstations for the past year and we see a foreseeable upgrade in the way we back up clients to the cloud in the coming year. Disk encryption will be enforced across the board on all client operating systems. Unidata IT can remotely manage any Unidata client workstation if it is connected to the internet.

UCAR’s Mesa Lab Data Center (MLDC) co-location facility upgrade is mostly complete, and Unidata is participating in staged moves rack-by-rack and are currently about 33% complete.   There may be the need to roll some of our Internet-based services to the NWSC in Cheyenne to avoid community visible service outages.

Daily, we continue efforts to keep services and systems secure which takes consistent attention and occasional herculean efforts (to patch everything all at once).  UCAR continues to embark on new initiatives to segment the network into smaller and smaller zones and gain a more dynamic inventory of assets on the network. Unidata continues to play a role in these efforts.

Ongoing Activities

We plan to continue the following activities:


Prepared September 2024