This is the second in our "Security/Resiliency Topic of the Month" series. We will be sending notices focused on either protecting university data or systems, your own personal data and systems, and on resiliency against unexpected outages (due to technological failures, cyber attacks, etc.). Though most are for our entire community, this was targeted for faculty and staff.
Most of you probably heard about the CrowdStrike incident back in July. This caused outages at businesses and universities including, airlines, hospitals, and many of our SUNY peers. If you haven't heard about it, or would like to read more on it, see the following:
Planning for disruption
Thankfully New Paltz was not impacted... this time. If instead of impacting CrowdStrike, the issue impacted systems we use at New Paltz, the same thing could have happened here. If it did, Information Technology Services would do everything we can to restore services as quickly as possible - but there could still be significant disruption.
The question I ask our faculty and staff is - what would you and your departments do if technology services were down, or significantly disrupted at the university for an hour? For a day? For a week?
Though some functions cannot occur without technology, others can continue if there are plans in place for business continuity.
Administrative Departments
If you are an administrative department, have you discussed internally what you would do if there was a complete technology outage? There may be some operations that would be completely unavailable (as an example, paying a bill or registering a student if Banner were inaccessible) but other operations could continue. Those operations which would be completely stopped, those which would be unimpacted, and those which could continue in a different manner would be different for each department.
Academic Departments and Faculty
What about academic departments or individual faculty? Are there things one could do to continue holding class with a complete technology outage? Could faculty have prepared a pocket lesson (something ready to conduct if there were a technology disruption that doesn't rely on technology such as a class discussion)?
Do you have any insights you could share that could assist other faculty and staff in preparing for such a disruption? If so, please reach out to me. We are hoping to schedule a session at the Faculty Development Center this Fall (details to be announced).