In May, the Division of Information Technology celebrates our student employees who are graduating and our retiring staff. We also prepare for the next academic year. Some of our projects are provided below.
After twenty-eight years of service, Chih-Ching Ma, Information Systems Supervisor, will retire in May. Ma began her career at K-State in 1993, when she was hired as an Applications Programmer/Analyst II and promoted to Systems Analyst. She was again promoted in 2001 to Information Systems Supervisor for Facilities and has served as Information Systems Supervisor in the Office of Information Systems (renamed to Business Intelligence, Analytics and Enterprise Applications) ever since. During her career, she led the largest development team for administrative applications on campus. Continue reading “Chih-Ching Ma to retire in May”
After five years of service to Kansas State University, Deputy CIO for Strategy,
Planning, and Enterprise Architecture will retire on June 2. As Deputy CIO, Draper’s work has included the planning for and coordination of strategic investments, managing the enterprise architecture, evaluating business processes, maturing business practices, overseeing the reporting and tracking of metrics, evaluating and developing the skills of the Division of Information Technology (IT) staff, and fostering an inclusive, networked environment. Draper joined K-State in 2016 as the Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology in the Office of the CIO and served for one year as interim Chief Information Security Officer. In 2019, she was promoted to Deputy CIO for Strategy, Planning, and Enterprise Architecture. Continue reading “Deputy CIO Betsy Draper to retire in June”
The Division of Information Technology staff is ready for spring and in full throttle with IT projects. We honor our amazing IT staff who are retiring this year. Collectively they have provided more than 160 years of service to K-State. Below are some of the projects we are working on.
Networking projects include:
Individuals with .edu email addresses are the target of an IRS-impersonation scam. Recently, the Internal Revenue Service warned of a scam that appears to target university college students and employees from public and private, profit and non-profit institutions.
The scam emails display the IRS logo and use subject lines such as “Tax Refund Payment” or “Recalculation of your tax refund payment.” It requests users to click a link and submit a form to claim their refund. Included on the form is a request for social security number, driver’s license number, date of birth, electronic filing PIN among other identifying information.
The status of an email refund can be verified from “Get Your Refund Status” on IRS.gov.
If you receive this scam email do not click the link, but report the scam to the IRS. For security reasons, forward the email as an attachment to phishing@irs.gov.
If you believe you have provided scammers with this information consider immediately obtaining an Identity Protection PIN; a voluntary opt-in program. The IP PIN is a six-digit number designed to prevent identity thieves from filing fraudulent tax returns in your name.
If you attempt to e-file your tax return and find it rejected because a return with your SSN has already been filed, file a Form 14039, Identity Theft Affidavit, to report yourself as a possible identity theft victim.
Source: IRS warns university students and staff of impersonation email scam, retrieved March 30, 2021.
Since the fire on the roof of Hale Library in May 2018, the Division of Information Technology (IT) has undertaken the goal of modernizing our data center with a cloud-first strategy. One of the largest projects was moving more than 800 K-State websites to the cloud.
Staff from the Division of Communications and Marketing and IT have spent countless hours planning, preparing, testing, and retesting. While some tweaking continues, the move is a great success. The benefits of moving to the cloud include disaster recovery/business continuity, scaling, resiliency, and reduced downtime. Continue reading “K-State completes successful migration of websites to the cloud”
The Division of Information Technology will perform network maintenance on one of the fiber paths into the Manhattan campus from 12:01-6 a.m. on Thursday, March 25. The majority of the Manhattan, Olathe, and Polytechnic campuses will experience a brief outage in internet connectivity as traffic is directed to a secondary path.
The Manufacturing Learning Center, the National Gas Machinery Laboratory, and the Institute for Environmental Research Lab will experience an extended outage of up to three hours during the maintenance window. The maintenance will improve overall fiber plant design and connectivity to these three buildings.
When the fiber work is completed, there will be a second brief outage as internet traffic is re-directed to the primary path. To report issues after the maintenance is completed, submit a ticket via helpdesk@ksu.edu or send an email to network@ksu.edu. Thank you to campus for your patience as we continue improving our infrastructure.
The Division of Information Technology staff are enjoying this gorgeous weather and making headway on networking and system projects.
Networking projects include:
Smaller Scale Infrastructure Projects
Listening sessions are underway for the Data Analytics Project to create an enterprise data store or data warehouse.
Gary Pratt, Kansas State University’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), has been named to the HEUG (Higher Ed User Group) Board of Directors. HEUG is a global nonprofit organization whose mission is “to facilitate sharing ideas, information, and experience among its members.” Enterprise systems have been the focus of HEUG, a 20+-year-old organization with 32,000 members from 900 campuses and 37 countries.
HEUG hosts the Alliance Conference every year, which “is the premier place for higher education and public sector knowledge sharing, collaboration with peers, and finding the inspiration that comes from learning about creative solutions.”
According to Pratt, “The Higher Education User Group (HEUG) was formed around the need to improve and enhance the core PeopleSoft and Oracle applications, including K-State’s primary administrative systems (KSIS, HRIS, and FIS). Membership on the HEUG Board will allow K-State to help guide the evolution of these key systems into the future.”
Most email scams and phishing attacks originate from outside of K-State. As part of our efforts to decrease phishing and other email scams, K-State will be adding a banner to email messages that originate outside of our university beginning March 2. This provides a visual indicator for users that the message was not sent from a user within K-State.
The goal of the disclaimer is to raise awareness about these scams and to be cautious.
Phishing emails are becoming more sophisticated and compelling. The text may include urgency, threats of loss of access, requests to change passwords, or fines if the user doesn’t respond. The sender’s email address can even be spoofed to appear as if it came from a K-State student, faculty or staff. Tagging these emails with a disclaimer is our way of providing information so users can make an informed decision about receiving, opening, etc.
If you have any questions, contact the IT Help Desk (helpdesk@k-state.edu).
