Re: Upgrading Authentication System
To: Executive Vice Presidents, Chancellors, Vice Presidents, Vice Chancellors, Vice Provosts, Deans, Directors and Heads of Schools, Divisions, Departments and Offices
From: Karl Browning, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
Date: December 8, 2020
Re: Upgrading Authentication System
Colleagues,
On December 27th, the ITaP team will be performing a critical hardware upgrade for the Authentication System (controls logins) that supports the entire Purdue community and predominantly all users of University applications or hardware, including desktops and laptops.
Why are we doing this now? The Authentication application currently resides on hardware that is over 10 years old and that is a single point of failure for a critical piece of IT Infrastructure. To state this more clearly, if the hardware supporting this application fails, significant downtime could occur and negatively impact our day to day operations of the University.
What will be impacted? From 10:30 AM to 8:30 PM on December 27th, please expect all IT systems and applications will be unavailable for use, including VPN access.
Over the next two weeks, the Purdue Security Services and Purdue System Cloud teams are testing the hardware upgrade and developing risk mitigation activities to prepare for the December 27th upgrade. Communication of this system outage will occur through multiple channels including email, the Exponent, Purdue Today and this document and will continue throughout the implementation and monitoring timeline as necessary.
In the days and weeks post upgrade, ITaP will be providing a heightened level of monitoring and has a designated team of experts and external consultants on-call to quickly react and minimize any negative impact on users of our IT systems.
Karl B. Browning
Vice President, Chief Information Officer