Wolverhampton weekly newsletter #17

Update from Week Eighteen

•  A busy week for IT committees with a meeting of the IT Task and Finish Group and Digital Strategy Committee.  We took away a number of new actions.  The "Shadow IT" workshop approach seemed to have gone OK and I have begun following up in background with Faculty of Arts and FHEW.  The presentation on the Systems Audit also appeared to be well received and some of the issues beginning to get understood.
• Arranged follow up calls with Gartner Group about its proposal.  The decision to not renew the IT intelligence contract with Mercato for procurement of IT commodities in the main may provide some partial budget funding but I have not yet been able to trace but who was paying and from which budget. At moment I have suggested this might be from next financial year subject to budget and new IT Director's interest.  We said we would speak again w/e April 21st after we know who has been appointed.  I learned that Gartner's Research Director for HE is Paul Saunders whose name I came across at Dundee last week.
• Arranged call with NCC Group - we have used them for various information security related activity including SECTIS, PCI-DSS and Penetration testing.  PCI-DSS came up later in week at our scrum.  There are deadlines looming for PCIDSS and plans to renew cyber essentials accreditation which is up for annual review (we only did it for one small area for research in July 2017).
• We had a regular weekly IT scrum meeting. 
• I spent an afternoon at Walsall meeting with the local team, colleagues from FHEW and Research and Enterprise.  I shared my notes as there was mention of 400 Moodle users and academic expertise in L&T spaces (among other things).
• We have been dealing with a storm of phishing emails (million+ per week) most of which do not get into the system but a few that do.  A new email URL filter implemented quarantined 133 "clicks" on malicious links which might have led to issues and there were no reported account compromises so far this week.  
• Met with Estates to discuss NorMAN launch and Easter business contingency planning - we agreed to share documents.  Very useful discussion on Estates creating campus "hubs" and a business case going to CMT shortly.  Perhaps an opportunity for Estates and DAS/IT to work together in future when we progress with face-to-face services - for example Hub is being created at Science park.
• New legal case management system approved with agreed caveats and controls as it is cloud based subscription service.  We will be running in time to migrate data from local desktops in the legal offices (and iDrive) to new service during Easter break.
• Meeting on Replicon led by procurement and the various users.  All were agreed that Replicon would continue in short term until Agresso solution and if we have all data in one system then potentially easier to migrate it across.
• Final meeting of the week dialled in on Friday to FHEW meeting on data storage. Wide ranging set of requirements - another example of a need for collaborative working solutions - also touched on WOLF (non L&T uses) and reassurances.

Good News

• No P1 incidents.