okay so I just want to start off with asking if you could tell me your name
and your position sure so my name is Tasha and I'm the director of information technology for the College
of Engineering okay where did your involvement in OSU begin well
my involvement in OSU began as a undergrad student I'm originally from
Fairbanks Alaska and I came to Oregon State on what was at the time called
national student exchange which was a program that allowed me I was a I was enrolled at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks I came to Oregon State as an exchange
student and it was kind of a cool program where I came here but I paid my
home University in-state tuition even though I was basically an out-of-state
student here and so I did that for a year I really liked OSU I liked
Corvallis and I ended up I was supposed to go back to Alaska and finished off my
education in Alaska but I ended up transferring to Oregon State the next
year and then was a full time out-of-state student here in Corvallis
and I finished my degree at OSU I was hired by the University I worked here
for a couple years and I took a job with Apple back in Alaska I was their system
engineer for k-12 education in Alaska and I missed Corvallis and missed OSU a
lot Apple had me traveling four days a week and I really didn't like that and
OSU asked me if I'd come back I did and I've just ever since I've been
consistently kind of working at the liner yeah um just could you tell me a
little bit about your ideology surrounding data privacy in society sure
it's a it's a very interesting topic because I think we I think would make a
lot of assumptions that vendors who we give our data to we're going to do a
good job of keeping it secure and if you look at the number of breaches and
compromises by companies you know whether its target or or REI or Facebook
her name is on or whomever you know it seems like we see often enough things in
the news about breaches where people's identity their passwords their credit card numbers whatever have been
compromised you know personally I see that maybe you see it as well when we get the statements about are the the
things about our car credit card numbers have been compromised and they send us a
new credit card I mean that's because of a data breach data privacy breach
somewhere along the chain so so I think we make a lot of assumptions that our
data in in with companies of the work with is secure when in fact if you look at the number of breaches that's not
always the case basically yeah yeah and that's you know some of that's
anecdotal just on what we hear but when you hear these breaches involving
millions of people you know chances are we're gonna be part of that as well so
you know that said there are many different services in the cloud that do
a lot of things to enhance our education our research our ability to conduct
business and so we kind of have to rely on that these days as a service provider
on campus we take data security very very seriously we do an awful lot to protect the identity of our students
staff and faculty and you know it's it's it's a
double-edged sword because some of the things that we do make people's lives more difficult for example some of the
resources that you have to use a VPN to connect to there are what there are
things that we could do that would not require a VPN I mean I could make it so
you could map a network drive off campus without requiring a VPN we know there
are vulnerabilities in that process though
and so by requiring a VPN we add another layer of security to that that process
that we know is prone to be compromised there are things that we do with
two-factor authentication are you familiar with two-factor authentication
with duo yeah so you know this spring duo will be required for all staff and
faculty and some point in the future will be required for students that's a choice that we've made to try to help to
perfect protect the identity and the security of of our students and staff
and faculty on campus related to that and this is kind of like a duo things
just on a side note sure my girlfriend notes actually visiting her over the
weekend and she has duo because she's a employee of the at her school in Utah State and I actually see like a great
problem with it just in the you know the monotony of
logging into like canvas or something needed to do time and I could see that
barrier there being negative for students and definitely like hindering
their you know interaction with the site itself cuz I see her you know I have to go on
your phone logging just to log to the web site and so I kind of saw that as
you know personally ease-of-use is definitely amazing for me because I'm
able to kind of quickly access information and you know I'm more
inclined to access it when it's easier to do yeah so knowing my assignments and
interacting with like school resources is a lot easier for me because you know
there's a barrier it's not like I'm walking to a class
yeah adding a barrier to that kind of like increases the difficulty yeah totally hit it for you do oh and abled
on campus not right now okay so one thing you would find here on campus is
that we do not require it for campus mm-hmm and that was that's another one
of those kind of interesting use cases because some of the feedback we got from
faculty members had to do with not allowing students to take their phones
into class then if you have an assignment that requires getting on canvas or a quiz or an exam then that
becomes a problem if you are requiring people to use that device so at least on
our campus and it's different everywhere but we're first degree it's the security
issue yeah yeah so for students who are do have enabled canvas is not protected
mm-hmm that's a that's a trade-off yeah okay so
on a daily basis what does your work can consist of all sorts of things I do in
our College of Engineering we have roughly twelve thousand users we're
about a third at the University I manage a staff of 13 full-time professionals and around 60 student workers we're
responsible for the day-to-day IT computing needs for all those
individuals and so it takes an entire team effort to take care of that
so I'm responding to user requests I you know this morning for example I just
before you came in I was listening to a panel discussion of new hire on campus
we're interviewing for the chief information security officer for the
university so I was kind of paying attention to that I was talking to a faculty member who wants to buy into one
of our computing clusters they're part of college of engineering in Bend and
we're talking with them about buying some new nodes for our cluster so really
kind of helping faculty members think about what kind of computing needs they
need to take care of their research is a big part of a bigger part of what I do I
interact a lot with different vendors and different partners that we have this morning
and another vendor that was here at nine o'clock were down in the first floor
Kelly Engineering Center we're looking to a remodel of of one of our conference
rooms and so I had a vendor that was in we were talking about ideas and kind of
use cases and how people want to use the facility and then they're gonna come
back to us with a proposal on how we might do that so I I do an awful lot to
represent the college of engineering or students staff and faculty within with
different IT groups on campus with with partners with vendors with donors you
know I tend to be the external face for our group for our college when it comes
to IT matters how does in your eyes have this cloud technology evolved education
it's it's had a huge impact on the way that we're able to provide services to
students you know I'll give you a couple of examples of that and it's it's not
just education it's kind of more than that we used to be a blackboard school
before canvas and blackboard was hosted on campus with servers on campus and we
would see often that those services are being overloaded particularly at the
beginning of the quarter and then during dead in finals week when we moved to
canvas we moved to a cloud provider and what's great about canvas is that
they're able to scale the computing resources that they have based on our
needs so we don't have to provide servers on campus to provide the
functionality of canvas it's all cloud hosted they you know they they manage
that they're the professionals at it and I think that's kind of been that's been one of the biggest things is that we pay
cloud providers to do a really good job at what they do we're not able to do
that on campus and we shouldn't we should not kid ourselves and think that
we can so if you look at services like box like WebEx like Google
was like those are those are big companies they specialize in doing that we should not even begin to kid
ourselves to think that we can compete with them there are other areas where we
can and we do a better job of things that are hosted on campus but for those
services that like that's their job that's how they make their money if
they're offline that's really bad for there just aren't holders in their
business we should not kid ourselves to think
that we can do a better job than they can where we should really be very
careful those around the data security piece and making sure that they are
properly vetted that we understand their practices around data security that we
understand that they understand FERPA and some of the other other federal
regulations and you have to deal with because you know we're still vulnerable
but I the services that they provide in the cloud are far better than anything
we could do on campus and you know we hope that by exposing students to those
and faculty members and building them into curriculum that that you as a
student are able to do great things and that you're able to collaborate with
others and you're able to innovate that you're able to study for your exam to learn new topics through those cloud
providers their big party education yeah yeah that's awesome especially with
vetting services around I guess yeah when did oh s you start to build the
largely did digital infrastructure we've had bits and pieces of that for a long
time you know back in the back in the early 90s we did class registration
electronically a very different look very different than it does now but you
know I would say early 90s and moving forward progressively data networking on
campus has been a real big issue in bringing all of our buildings up to
appropriate specifications for data capacities and speeds and wireless and
you know the whole pushed towards wireless access points and mobile
devices that really spurred us to do a lot for providing good wireless service
in and you know now we have we were rated this past fall is the number one
fastest Wi-Fi in the country yeah for any public university or any public or
private university that's a pretty big deal and that is a that's the that's the result of a progression of us taking
this very seriously and adding more and more into our portfolio with with in so
you know when I think of digital that that's a pretty wide wide spectrum but
yeah if you look at any one piece of that it takes an entire team to build
that and so it's on top of itself yeah exactly so you know for example if you
look at just Wireless as a piece of that there's a wireless access point outside
my office the infrastructure and the different groups on campus that are
required to come together for that is pretty extreme because there's the
access point out there it runs through a network it plugs into a switch it then
runs through some fiber it plugs into a router it runs through some more fiber
it goes through our controller through a firewall and then it goes through some
more fiber and it goes out to a router which then connects us to the Internet
you know that's a that involves multiple groups on campus the people that that
build the fibre that specify where the X point access point needs to be that run
the routers that run the firewalls that run all the different configuration
things that's that's that's a number of different people from a number of
different groups and over time as as the kind of the digital sense of the
university has increased we've had to step up in each of those areas as well
and now we're at a point where we're it's pretty cool because we we have a
good we have really good people that the each of those areas that were able to
work together and then more on the you know the third party side with Amazon
however Amazon Web Services integrated with OSU sure yeah so about a year ago
we signed what's called an enterprise agreement with Amazon which means that
we're able to officially do business with them we have a contract in place
that allows us to do this that protects both groups right now most of our spend
on Amazon is on the research side of the house so research computing so you're a
faculty member or a grad student you have a need for computing resources and
you make the decision that you want to spend that up in Amazon instead of
buying hardware that we would post here on campus and so most of our spend right
now is on the research side of the house we do have a couple of things so there
are more infrastructures so for example there's a service that we run called
single sign-on and that's the kind of the familiar place where regardless if
you're going to sign into box or Google or one or WebEx there's or canvas
there's a login screen that comes up and you enter your onid credentials up until
I don't know six months or so ago all of that single sign-on piece was held on
campus and what that meant was if we ever had a really bad internet outage and the campus was disconnected then
even though you had services in the cloud like canvas and in Google and
inbox you would not be able to access them because you first had to come back
to campus for that single sign-on piece.we now hosts one of our single
sign-on servers in amazon and if my second backup yeah as a real-time backup
so if the university were to be disconnected from the internet whether
that was through a tape act of terrorism or an earthquake or a natural hazard
we'd still be able to access these services that are cloud hosted because
instead of having to come back to campus we're able to host that single sign-on
piece in the Amazon Cloud that's pretty cool it's a nice note of resiliency for
us and gives us some options without having the contract and pieces of parts in place we
would not have been able to do that okay so that's just one kind of practical
example for you of how Amazon was able to accomplish what we do so in addition
to that what specific and information is collected by Amazon the specific
information collected by Amazon really depends on the service that we spent up in the Amazon
so as Amazon Web Services as a whole they collect email address from us and our billing index so that we know how to
route filling back and forth people who build services in Amazon though they might collect different pieces of data
so if I'm running a research project and I build a service in Amazon then I'm
running that server and I might be collecting different pieces of data but as far as Amazon themselves there's very
little about us that they collect but they have it there you know like the
data is stored with them correct the data is stored with them it's encrypted
and they do not have access to it okay so it's a very interesting thing because
if you're familiar with the concept of a data center where big building lots of
servers Amazon controls access to the data center so they make sure that
somebody off the street can't come in and just steal servers we control access to the data and the services that we
build upon the data center and that's something that Amazon makes very clear
is that they don't have access to the services that we provide they only have
access to the physical data center ok so it's a it's a kind of a different way of
thinking because if we're spitting up services in Amazon we have to be very
very careful about what type of data we collect and who we open that up to and
the security policies that we enforce because you know it's completely
possible for you to create an account in Amazon spin up a service spin up a
server and collect data from people and not have
encrypted hmm so there's a lot of responsibility that comes back to the
end-user to you or me or who's ever building services in Amazon to
understand how that works to understand the data security pieces and to make
very wise decisions okay that's we take that very very seriously
and any time that we are spinning up services or we're providing service to Amazon that's a discussion that we have
yeah that's important it's very very important yeah
do you think OSU is transparent enough when it comes to which company's process
and store student data I have to think so mostly because the companies that we
use you as a students see every day so you see the canvas the Google the Box
you see the type of data that goes in there because you have your it's
interactive and you're you're interacting it with every with it every
day you know to take canvas as an example you see the type of class
information that's there because you see your course curriculum you see the
assignments the presentations you know that's the type of data that each of
those companies hold for us and you have direct access into it what a student be
able to attend OSU but abstain from using services from third parties I
think it would be really difficult these days hmm I mean what would you like be without canvas yeah or BOTS or Google I
mean I presume you have worked on their document together in Google you know I
emailed you from yeah you emailed me from Google I think it'd be pretty hard
yeah what do you what do you think I that's that's the thing it's like it
would be almost impossible to manage financial statements from you know student the student tab to look at you
know courses to see homework it would be or schedule an advising appointed get a syllabus yeah you can't you can't give
it like they don't hand that physic syllabi I know
so it's it's it seems that education isn't instead of a single entity it's
you know placing part of itself and growing in other places and it's you you
have to make that trade-off yeah and before you I guess in historically
it was you know buying books or financially like you'd have to trade
your money to access education now it's trading information and money it's kind
of it's and there's always been that trade-off so it's it's interesting it's
not it's not really it's not your choice yeah so it's it's pretty in with the
value of education yeah it it really opens up yeah issues yeah
just as on processes I think it'd be it'd be really hard mm-hmm to come to
school and not use your Gmail and to you'd be at a serious disadvantage yeah
I'm not quite sure how that was working yeah um also quizzes yeah literally and
just couldn't take quizzes yeah so that's something else you know I will
I will add one thought to that though something that I don't you may bring it
up but something that we're pretty careful about though are the services
that we subscribe to and their ability to provide services to disabled students
because I think it's pretty easy for you and I to use our laptop and access
things on the internet someone who's blind or can't hear or he and talk
though as as a very very different game you know a very different experience and
so we make sure that that the services that we do subscribe to our applicable
to students with any type of disability and they're there there are different
certifications that these companies have to go through difficult to prove that so
you know it's pretty easy for you and I to pick up our phones and do things someone who can't see though that's a
very ball game from him so you know just kind
of just that's just gonna random but it baby I know that's it yeah that though
and with disabilities and health information you know that's that's also
stored with the school and I assume on you know is transmitted through Amazon
or infrastructure because where this stored
yeah those particular things are not stored in the cloud okay that that
particular type of information is scored is stored in something called banner
which is a which is our big student database for student information and that is on campus okay so that kind of
thing is