CatNet 2.0 Migration Moves Forward

Migration to a new modern, secure Active Directory (CatNet 2.0) gained critical momentum in FY22. The project team surveyed campus IT to find out what kinds of support would help them most in getting their CatNet 1.5 assets migrated to CatNet 2.0.

The survey resulted in the creation of a community of practice group. A total of 253 members were invited to drop into weekly meetings for tips, best practices, and help. A CatNet 2.0 portal also provides migration guides and a checklist.

UITS staff coordinated with campus IT to migrate organizational units (OUs), and support the migration of campus servers and workstations.

The team moved several Microsoft support functions to automated forms in ServiceNow. IT staff can now request Microsoft software, departmental email accounts and email groups by submitting a ticket. This saves them time, avoiding lengthy training and provisioning processes.

With this additional support, campus IT units identified many accounts, workstations and servers in the old CatNet 1.5 that were obsolete and didn’t need to be migrated, saving time and effort for them. This progress puts the University in a good position to reach the June 30, 2023 deadline to decommission CatNet 1.5.

Major Service Management Upgrade

In July 2021, UITS launched ServiceNow, a new IT service management system that is creating more integrated connections between service information, service requests, and support staff.

The new tool includes an IT services catalog, knowledge articles, and request forms, including 24/7 Support Center online help requests. It also handles 24/7 in-person visit check-ins and alerts for system outages, automatically notifying support staff via text for high-impact outages.

After the portal launched, the team continued to make improvements to its design and content as well as adding new functionality. For example, the configuration management database (CMDB) capability was added to manage the inventory of workstations and automatically notify support staff when a machine is due for refresh. As of June 2022, the portal included 160 catalog items and 195 service request forms, many of which create automated workflows to reduce IT staff workload.

Campus partners are also on-boarding to ServiceNow for support ticketing, including the University Libraries, College of Veterinary Medicine, James E. Rogers College of Law, UCATT Adobe Team and Business Affairs Auxiliary Services.

New Cloud Services Create Greater Efficiency

In FY22, the CIO Division began offering a full turnkey experience to units who want to be completely cloud resident. Managed Cloud Services (MCS) allows faculty, researchers and staff to use the software and server space they need in the cloud without having to become cloud experts.

One of the first spaces to move completely to the cloud was the UITS colocation servers where campus customers run virtual machines. All customers are now running virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud instead. This saved the University $150,000 in hardware refresh costs.

The first campus customer to move into MCS was the College of Public Health. The MCS team supported the migration of their data warehouse into a MySQL database in the Amazon Web Services cloud, saving them hundreds of dollars per year in MS SQL licensing costs and accelerating their adoption of cloud services.

Biosphere 2 was another early adopter. Moving to the cloud saved them $100,000 in costs replacing server hardware at their site, plus the overhead of maintaining physical servers.

Learn more about the Managed Cloud Services at it.arizona.edu/cloud-services/