Office 365 free for university staff and students

At UCISA 2012 we heard that Microsoft announced Office 365 for staff as well as students on a no fee basis, including Sharepoint and Lync as well as Exchange. This is in direct competition with Google Apps.

DaMaRO project

The Data Management Rollout at Oxford (DaMaRO) Project is creating a research data management policy for the University and the infrastructure to enable researchers to comply with it. We will be taking the outputs of the various research data management projects that the University has been engaged in over the last few years and combining them into a better-integrated suite of tools and discovery mechanisms that will support researchers throughout the data life-cycle, from planning to re-use.

Of particular note is the ‘DataFinder’ tool that DaMaRO will be developing. This will enable the discovery of data hosted in various places around the University and beyond, including the Bodleian Libraries' 'DataBank' (developed through the Admiral and DataFlow projects), the Database as a Service (DaaS) system (created during the Sudamih and VIDaaS Projects), departmental and other local data stores, the Web 2 research management network 'Colwiz', and hopefully the 'LabTrove' system developed by the University of Southampton. It will also connect this data with research papers and publications held in the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).

Information Security Project Started

The InfoSec project will move the University to a new degree of information assurance, make it more secure, mitigate information risk, and undertake the work necessary to create a permanent enterprise-wide activity that will deliver she best possible Information Security (IS) for Oxford. The project has established a team which is responsible for helping the Collegiate University to be compliant with a set of IS policies which have been developed and will be endorsed by Council in TT 2012.

VIDaaS/Dataflow Workshop, 2 March 2012

On Friday 2nd March the VIDaaS Project will be staging a joint workshop with our colleagues from the DataFlow Project at the Saïd Business School in Oxford. The day will run from 10:30 am until 5pm, and feature demonstrations of the database-as-as-service software developed by the VIDaaS Project and the DataStage software that forms the centrepiece of the DataFlow Project. Delegates will also get to look at the DataBank data repository system that Oxford is introducing, and hear about the cloud infrastructure that the University has built – partly in order to host the outputs of VIDaaS. There will also be plenty of time to ask question, discuss developments, and get to know the other delegates.

Town Meeting - to discuss the UK Strategy for a Research Computing Ecosystem and the future of e-Science

A remarkable Town Meeting has been held at UCL, at which a draft Strategic Plan for the UK Research Computing Ecosystem was discussed. For years we have been trying to find the best way to build on the successes of the UK e-Science programme.

The timing of the Town Meeting proved to be inspired as in a recent development the Strategic Plan and associated documentation will be considered by David Willetts / BIS and circulated to university Vice Chancellors next Wednesday (13 July).

The Strategic Plan will be crucially important in the development of a coherent framework for the UK’s research computing ecosystem. The draft received strong support from attendees at the Town Meeting.

Steve Butcher (head of HEFCE Shared Services) spoke at the Town Meeting and offered to work with the community to develop the Strategic Plan further.

Please leave comments on the draft Strategic Plan referenced above.

Government Information Assurance Event, 28/29 June 2011

The eleventh Information Assurance event was held in London.

In Autumn 2010 the National Security Strategy identified cyber attacks on national infrastructure among “Tier 1” Security threats. Reflecting the severity of this threat, the UK government plans to spend £650 million over four years on a National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP), to reinforce the nation’s defenses against cyber attack.

Last October the Prime Minister placed cyber security at the top of the national security agenda last. Recognising the importance of Information Assurance in achieving cyber security, the new National Cyber Security Strategy, incorporates the National IA Strategy.

The Government ICT Strategy released earlier this year, is focused specifically on opening up public services and delivering digital by default. The claim made is that the ICT strategy will deliver better public services for less cost through increased openness. But the openness comes with risk, and a safe and trusted environment is essential.

A strong message from all speakers is that the employee is the weakest information security point of the organisation. Education is vital.

New devices are agents of change. Users are becoming empowered in choosing devices and how the devices are used, and this leads to new threats:

Device and data loss

More than half of all users do not lock devices

5-10% of tablets and 15-25% phones lost/stolen each year

Mobile devices predicted to be new malware frontier

Google removed 50 infected Apps from MarketPlace after more than 200k down-loads

User behaviour

Average iPhone has 60 applications downloaded; users more readily download to Smartphones than to laptops.

Greater use of social media

It was stated that there is a serious disconnect between policy and reality and between policy awareness and adherence.

JISC-funded Study of Early Adopters of Cloud Computing and Shared Services

The FEAST report, an overview of the adoption of shared services and cloud computing in universities, which was funded by JISC and has been published recently, is worth a read.

HE has an excellent record in shared services eg purchasing consortia, JANET, UCAS. However many in-house activities are perceived to offer competitive advantage.

The report is aimed and written for VCs, Finance directors etc.

Text copied from the JISC web-page:

Purpose

To conduct a study to identify, explore, document and analyse examples of large-scale shared services and cloud computing implementations for core administrative and related academic systems across universities and colleges in theUK and globally.

To produce models and high quality guidance materials on effective practice around shared services and cloud computing planning and implementation in further and higher education aimed at different stakeholder groups.

Description

This study collated details from more than 250 different projects across the HE sector globally to demonstrate good examples of common frameworks and mutual cooperation, shared services and cloud computing initiatives. 80+ examples relevant to the Further and Higher Education sector (UK or internationally) have been been documented in vignettes and 5 specifically interesting examples have been expanded in to detailed case studies to illustrate the lessons and pitfalls of each project.