All University Information Services - Digital Literacy Skills courses

University Information Services (UIS) and the TechLink coordinators are hosting an IT forum event for Lent Term. During the afternoon we'll highlight some important UIS updates from a variety of divisions and in addition, you'll hear from some external speakers of tech expertise.

University Information Services (UIS) and the TechLink coordinators are hosting a second IT forum event. The afternoon event will cover UIS updates from the Infrastructure and DevOps Divisions and a representative from Dell.

• 14:15-14:25: Introduction to IT Portfolios. Mark Rowland will give a brief overview of what the Portfolios are and who in the University is responsible for each element.

• 14:25-14:55: The UIS Accessibility Working Group will update on work going on to ensure that we provide accessible services. They will highlight plans for institutions that will need to adapt to review the accessibility of their own websites and services and to write accessibility statements. There'll be a demo of screen reading technology working with inaccessible materials, and the difference that a few relatively simple updates can make to improve the experience for all.

• 14:55-15:05: Rich Wareham from UIS DevOps will share what UIS's technology staff hope to achieve by starting a new Community of Practice following a recent unconference event.

• 15:05-15:15: Break

• 15:15-15:50: Phoenix Software (our Microsoft Office365 partners) will update on some of the shared Office 365 experience across the University, including how some institutions are using Mimecast, such as for GDPR compliance. - POSTPONED

• 15:50-16:00: The recent Oxford IT Forum Conference was another excellent combination of talks and workshops, and vendor interaction. Brief highlights of the day will be provided by Ronald Haynes, along with ideas about further expanding our collaborative IT efforts with Oxford.

• 16:00-16:30: Celebratory refreshments -This will be the final seminar of this academic year, and as usual, there will be some light refreshments to celebrate the end-of-term!

• A presentation and workshop-style session introducing how IT works in the University of Cambridge. Covering what is expected of an IT professional working within a college, department or University institution, this session will explain what resources are available for them, including IT-specific material.
• This induction is useful for any new (or relatively new) IT staff, or as a refresher for those who may have missed the opportunity to attend at the start of their IT role within the University.
• The session will provide the opportunity to network with IT professionals across the University, and to meet UIS staff and Relationship Managers who are key contacts for supporting IT staff.

The Research Computing Services division has recently launched a new service which provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capability. The service provides instant high-performance compute, storage, network resources and other functionality. It helps to avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other data centre infrastructure. It enables IT practitioners and research groups to build their own scalable platforms that fit their exact needs and requirements. More information can be found here https://www.hpc.cam.ac.uk/research-computing-cloud-services

The research Computing Services team will present Research Computing Cloud service capabilities and details about the platform that the service is built on. There also will be a live demo of the platform and a Q&A session.

The Research Computing Services team will provide an update on some recent and engaging developments by the division, including:

• An overview of current CSD3 (Cambridge Service for Data-Driven Discovery) platforms as well as some key news about planned upgrades in the forthcoming months.
• The Data Accelerator - high performance, all-flash ephemeral storage for a new kind of scratch tier. New storage offering for the most demanding science workloads.
• Bare metal cloud with Openstack - taking a peek into the future of the research computing infrastructure.
• Secure Research Computing Platform - Using OpenStack, GitlabTerraform, Ansible to deliver secure (and movable) computing environments. Includes a demonstration.

There will also be a brief TechLink Community update, including an overview of a developing joint pilot for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) with Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, Edinburgh (COGENT).

Handling the large volume of spam, ransomware and other malware delivered via email to often indignant users has become quite a large part of standard IT duties over the past few years. Along with the increasing complexity of the tricks and techniques used by hacker groups for spearphishing and delivering malware, it is clearly apparent that there is only so much that professional IT staff can expect from their users in terms of determining what is, and is not, malware or phishing.

Yet the pressure on often relatively junior administrative and financial staff has not decreased and the time taken to try and work out what is genuine and what is not does not make for smooth time management. Most important of all, IT practitioners must not indulge in the blame culture when an incident happens, simply because the person blamed will probably never "own up" to making a possible mistake again. A positive culture - even admitting "Yes, it has happened to me" - is essential to encourage users to be open about mistakes.

This seminar will attempt to show some of the more common of the latest spammer tricks, and introduce some tools which (hopefully) will make your life easier.

Induction Day for new IT Staff

This day-long session introduces how IT works in the University of Cambridge, its idiosyncrasies and governance, what is expected of an IT professional working within the collegiate university and what resources are available for them. It covers IT specific material and does not duplicate the PPD Introductory Conference. The programme for the day is:

9:00-9:30 Registration

9:30-9:50 Welcome to Cambridge

9:50-10:30 IT within the University

10:30-10:50 Coffee

10:50-11:30 The user

11:30-12:10 The network

12:10-13:30 Lunch — representatives from various service groups will be milling around to talk to

13:30-14:10 Your responsibilities

14:10-14:50 University-wide services

14:50-15:10 Coffee

15:10-15:50 Building the IT community

15:50-16:00 Conclusion and End

Kieren Lovell and Dr David Modic, from the Computer Laboratory, will be presenting on the most common attack vectors for Social Engineering, and connecting the research to practical advice for Researchers and Staff travelling to areas of increased risk.

As an experiment, we are looking to run this event in webinar format. Joining instructions will be e-mailed to those that have signed up by 11am on the day.

Bob Dowling will be talking about Blue, the UIS' Active Directory, what options it creates for Institutional IT staff and plans for further development.