IT answers questions about UC ANR’s web environment and remediation plan

During the July ANR town hall, Jaki Hsieh-Wojan explained the causes of instability of UC ANR's websites.

At UC ANR's July Town Hall, Jaki Hsieh Wojan, UC ANR's chief information security officer, explained ANR's recent website and portal issues and the steps being taken to solve them. Below are questions that were asked during the town hall.

Why are we keeping physical servers in Davis? Have you considered transferring from local modems to cloud-based methods?

We are working on a long-term project to move some of ANR's data to the cloud: Integrated Web Platform. IWP will be deployed on Google Cloud. Because we have nearly 1,300 websites, it's taking time to implement a common platform to fit everyone's needs. It is not as simple as picking up our webpage sand moving them to a cloud host, that would just move the existing problems into a new location.  The IWP project is rearchitecting the entire web content management system. You can see the progress at https://iwp.ucanr.edu.

Will ANR publications be preserved?

Yes

Before archiving are you asking permission from the owners of data? Is the data available after archiving if needed?

Active sites won't be removed in our first pass. Before data is archived, owners will be contacted or leaders of the units, if the owner isn't available. Archived data will be kept and can be restored, if needed. 

We can't change owners of websites so some of our sites belong to people who are no longer with ANR. How will IT handle this?

IT can change website owners. You can submit a ticket for that request at help@ucanr.edu

What are our options for taking credit card payments online?

Aventri is an option for taking credit card payments. IT is looking into additional options.

We use some of those websites that are not updated often as a resource of information for the community after an academic leaves. It will be unfortunate to lose that resource. 

Archived data will be preserved and can be made available. You will be able to contact help@ucanr.edu if you need access to archived data.

How can I help reduce the volume of data on the servers?

Please maintain your SiteBuilder sites. Remove images that are no longer being used on particular pages, deactivate or delete outdated info, etc. Send a message to iwp@ucanr.edu if you need assistance. 

Why are we purchasing new onsite equipment if the goal is to move to the cloud?

Moving to cloud is a multiyear, complex project and it encompasses far more than the website and portal.  A “lift and shift” of our current environment to the cloud would just move our current problems to a different location.  We need to modernize on a local level before we can fully migrate everything.

Can we have an all IT Town Hall?

Yes. 

I am worried about refresh rates when the Content Delivery Network (CDN) is in place.

The refresh rates can be granularly configured to treat each type of content with different refresh rates. We will be working on optimizing these rates once we start using the CDN. We will communicate how best to request a different refresh rate when we get closer to implementation. 

A recording of Jaki Hsieh-Wojan's presentation can be viewed at https://youtu.be/wAQGGimS3Rg.

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