30 November is Computer Security day and with recent reports of lost data and hacking attacks on major companies, now would be a good time to do the online CyberAware course which the University has invested in to help all its staff to stay safe online. This will give you the necessary training to stay ahead of cyber criminals and protect yourself and the University from online fraud. To find out more and to enrol on the course, click here.
When you have completed that, more modules will be made available to you on a quarterly basis through emails from the course provider, Knowbe4.
To keep up to date with the latest advice about staying safe online, please read our IT security blog.
Upgrades and maintenance
- Scheduling of IT maintenance and upgrade work
The University’s IT systems, servers and applications require continual maintenance to keep them up-to-date, improve services, address issues and strengthen security. Digital Technology Services (DTS) carries out most of this during the working day without impacting staff or students but sometimes work can affect services. The University has agreed IT maintenance windows outside core working hours and DTS usually schedules maintenance, improvements and security updates during these times if they are likely to involve either short periods of localised downtime or a risk to services. These are known as ‘at risk’ periods. It is worth bearing this in mind when you are planning important work.
Every week there are two main IT ‘at risk’ periods – for maintenance and upgrades
Tuesday mornings between 7am and 9am
Friday evenings between 6pm and 10pm
Where service-affecting changes take longer or cannot be planned within these windows, DTS will take steps to communicate any outages to the impacted areas beforehand.
- IT Network switch upgrades during December
A series of upgrades is planned which will cause some early morning disruption to network services in some buildings during the Tuesday ‘IT at risk’ windows (7am to 9am) during December.
The work will affect some wired network devices and some wireless services but each building should only be impacted on one of the Tuesdays and only for between 10 and 20 minutes.
The work will affect IT services in the following buildings:
- Harmer (Level 5 – AVID training lab)
- Surrey
- Heart of the Campus
- Collegiate Library
- Charles Street
- Robert Winston
The dates of each piece of work cannot be finalised until very near the time but if you have important events happening during this period and are concerned that the work might affect them, please contact IT Help for assistance in making contingency arrangements. DTS is checking timetabled teaching activity scheduled in the buildings for this time so the staff concerned can be contacted and will work closely with Library staff to minimise disruption for students who might be working there.
Thank you for your patience during this important work to maintain security and improve services.
- Outlook public folders – unavailable from 6pm on Wednesday 6 December
The final major part of the Outlook to Office 365 migration, moving public folders, will take place on 6 December. While the work takes place, public folders will be unavailable from 5pm on Wednesday 6 December until 8am on Thursday 7 December.
- Reminder – shuspace and Blackboard unavailable from 5pm on Friday 1 December
To install a new inline marking tool (to replace Crocodoc), we are making an update which means Blackboard and shuspace will be unavailable from 5pm on Friday 1 December and at risk on Saturday 2 December. For more details, please visit the DTS blog.