Many Bobcats struggled through last week’s snow and ice storm that crippled Texas and led to power outages and water shortages. But thanks to some smart long-term decisions and the hard work and dedication of staff in the Division of Information Technology, some vital university technology services remained operational through the storms.
A key decision in the tenure of current Vice President Kenneth Pierce has been to move select vital services to the cloud. Doing so means that things like BobcatMail and Microsoft Teams continued to function even with power outages on the two Texas State campuses.
“Access to Teams was critical to operations as it served as a central place for staff to communicate and keep informed about what was going on,” said Ben Rogers, Assistant Vice President of the IT Assistance Center (ITAC).
Multiple teams and individuals from across the division were part of an IT response team created in Microsoft Teams. Those around the clock communications throughout the event allowed work to happen that bolstered the ability to protect important systems on campus.
“If our email servers were on the premises, email would have gone down,” said Pierce.
The same is true of several other important systems that are now in the cloud rather than housed in on-campus data centers, including most of TXST Canvas, which is on Canvas servers. There is also an emergency backup for the university website maintained off-campus. It prevents readers from getting “site unavailable” messages and allows the university to post updates until the main infrastructure is back up.
“By utilizing the cloud we were able to continue some level of services for students, faculty, and staff despite the power outages,” he said.
Not every system was immune to the problems, of course, and staff are still hard at work this week cataloging and repairing damage to on-premise systems like university phone lines and network infrastructure that support wi-fi and other systems.
Scott Ayers is director of IT Marketing and Communications.
