This past July, The Office of Information Technology (OIT) upgraded its campus border to the internet from a complex legacy architecture to a simplified, modern border that provides almost three times the bandwidth and significantly improves network security and operational resilience. 

For those unfamiliar, the internet is a network of networks. Our internet border’s job is to ensure that data being transported between outside networks and UCI’s networks are directed in safe and secure ways. Together with firewalls, this system provides protection to UCI’s incredibly important digital assets. As one of the earliest adopters of this technology in the UC system when it was still relatively new, the homegrown system initially created to protect campus slowly became a complicated puzzle of patches and augmentations. Making enhancements to the system was laborious and often resulted in prolonged network downtime. 

“The design of our infrastructure was very complex and patching the border environment was becoming increasingly difficult,” explained Paul Kang, assistant CISO of IT security operations & engineering. “This update reduced the complexity greatly, resulting in easier future maintenance and improved security.”

OIT advocated heavily to fully re-architect the system, which would ultimately allow for easier maintenance, faster connectivity and a robust security system to protect against malicious actors. After funding was approved for the project, a multi-disciplinary team from inside and outside of OIT was created to tackle the tremendous tasks of planning and implementation. It took over 18 months of planning, many weeks of testing with the prototype built in the data center lab and seven hours of day-of tedious execution to successfully complete. It was a collaborative effort that engaged a variety of campus partners. 

“This was one of the best project implementations we’ve ever done,” said Stacey Rose, assistant director of network and telecommunications services. “Even on the night of the cutover, there were times we had over 35 people on a call; it was very collaborative, trusting and respectful. When someone was troubleshooting something, the entire group allowed that person to work through those issues without interruption.” 

While most of the impact from this upgrade won’t physically be seen by the UCI campus community, it’s an important milestone in the extensive IT security plans to protect confidentiality, integrity and availability of Institutional Information and IT services. In support of the UC’s system-wide focus on security, OIT has steadily been making improvements for several years. Implementation of Duo multi-factor authentication, adoption of more secure email clients, and this border security upgrade are just a few examples of the progress being made to protect the entire campus community.