Now that Fiscal Year 2023 is officially behind us, I would like to take a moment to thank you for the integrity and professionalism you continually demonstrate each day as part of WashU IT. Guided by the university’s Here and Next and the IT ImpacT strategic plans, we accomplished all the goals we set out to achieve.
Here is a recap of our exciting year:
- Following many months of conversations at all levels within the organization, in March we launched ImpacT to a record number of attendees at our IT All Hands meeting. Our strategic plan and project roadmap will align our priorities with the university’s, paving the way for the implementation of our Digital Transformation.
- We filled three key positions within WashU IT, hiring our first Chief Technology Officer Greg Hart, naming Amy Walter as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, Clinical, and Medical Education Technologies, and selecting Jennifer Stedelin as our first Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic and Administrative Technologies who started this month.
- With the partnership of campus, we obtained approval from the board for our FY23 and FY24 cybersecurity investment, with more work to come in FY25-26. We carefully used part of our 5-year investment to significantly reduce the risk of material harm to the university from a cyber event by completing an inventory of more than 70% of WashU School of Medicine servers and 70% of WUSM Endpoint Devices. Additionally, we implemented Privileged Access Management (PAM) for 95% of identified accounts in compliance with requirements and expanded CrowdStrike Endpoint Detection and Response system and the logging of system events to Splunk to 95% of identified users across the university.
- We implemented a new IT Governance and Portfolio Prioritization process that will guide IT investments and established new and revised governance committees. Each will adopt a meeting cadence in early FY24.
- Leveraging an investment from Dr. David Perlmutter, Dean of the School of Medicine, we enhanced the Research Storage Platform core infrastructure with new hardware and software technologies. Through this investment, we will expand features focusing on security enhancements for role-based access controls, offsite disaster recovery and ransomware protections, and operational management improvements. This will lead to 2- to 3-times greater performance and capacity capabilities, while reducing ongoing operational costs.
The success of these efforts is because of you. Through our shared commitment to excellence, we move closer to becoming a world-class information technology department. I am feeling very positive about what lies ahead in FY24.