Many Bobcats struggled through last winter’s snow and ice storm, which 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, essential university technology services remained operational through the storms.
Thanks to Vice President Ken Pierce’s vision to move vital services to the cloud, tools like BobcatMail and Microsoft Teams continued to function even with power outages on both 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, associate vice president of the IT Assistance Center (ITAC).
Staff 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 essential 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 vital systems 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 central 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,” Pierce said.
Not every system was immune to the problems, of course. But division staff were there to help. Staff worked hard to catalog and repair damage to on-premises systems like university phone lines and network infrastructure that support wi-fi and other systems.
Written by IT Marketing and Communications staff.