Universities have more in common with modern cities than traditional places of learning. This mini city needs to empower its citizens to thrive and achieve their ambitions. Operationalising data is key to building critical services; from understanding complex IT estates for smarter decision-making to robust security and a more reliable, resilient student experience. Juan will share his experience in building data foundations for a resilient future whilst enabling digital transformation at Imperial College London.
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Data foundations building success, at city scale – Imperial College London
1. Gartner Symposium
7 November 2022
Building for a resilient future whilst enabling digital
transformation
Data foundations building
success, at city scale
Juan Villamil, CIO, Imperial College London
2. • A community of problem-solvers dedicated
to finding innovative solutions to the world's
biggest challenges
• A world top ten university with an
international reputation for excellence in
teaching and research
• A multidisciplinary space for education,
research, translation and commercialisation,
harnessing science and innovation
Mission Statement: to achieve
enduring excellence in research and
education in science, engineering,
medicine and business for the
benefit of society.
3. 17,000 students
& 8,000 staff
9 campuses
• accommodation
• offices
• facilities
• connectivity
• and so much more
Education
Research Innovation
Flexible ICT needed to support cutting edge
problem solvers, constantly changing and evolving
4. Our vision for a world class ICT function is to
provide enhanced and consistent experience that
supports the College’s digital goals:
• Interactive teaching techniques
• Cutting-edge online and digital technology
• Research to embrace the possibilities of data
5. These ambitions lean on us as ICT enablers
to provide:
• a seamless, digital student journey
• the best tools and systems
• robust and reliable technology & infrastructure
• delighted customers
• confidence in cyber security
• the best technology talent
6. Transformation journey
Current State
Preparation for digital journey:
creating a shared understanding
of requirements, priorities &
dependencies of stakeholders.
Interim State
Transition & tech debt focus:
preparing the infrastructure to
enable the ‘new world’; updating
and modernising the estate.
Target State
Transformation:
focus is on the future of
transforming the student and
staff experience to realise the
College’s ambitions.
• maintain competitiveness
• minimise & mitigate technology risks
• maximise cost effectiveness
• improve agility and pace of delivery cycles
9. started small…
utilising whilst
building on
security
expertise
& tools
kept asking…
“what more can
we do with our
data to add
more value,
stretch
capabilities”
enabled growth:
moved to
flexible model
whilst
leveraging extra
potential in the
cloud
2020 2022
Growing to address challenges
11. Improved security - Imperial gained visibility into hundreds of services, shortened response
times to security incidents and supported data-based decision-making
Data is easily accessible to teams across the organization,
from developers and product managers to the CIO and CTO.
Informed decision making - real-time data allows us to
quickly remedy any incidents and share insights across the
organization for smarter decision-making, uncompromised
security and a more reliable, resilient student experience.
Business impact
“Using Splunk
Synthetics we simulate
users accessing over
150 services,
data from these
2 million checks a month
alert us to availability
and performance issues"
12. mini-city
Education
Research Innovation
• Data as a foundation for
the ‘mini-city’
• Delivering our strategy
through technology that
enables expert citizens
• Supporting wide-spread
growth focused on
impact & business value
Engagement growth & business value
13. • Increase risk-based reporting
• Expand use for financial planning
• Add Dev Ops pipeline support
• Enabling further engagement with the business
• Offering this operational analytics services to
research groups and broader departments
The future landscape
14. Thank you
If you’d like to know more or just have a chat please
come and visit us at the Splunk Booth: 511
15. Information Communication Technologies (ICT)
Imperial College London
Level 4 Sherfield Building
South Kensington Campus
London, SW7 2AZ
www.imperial.ac.uk/ict
@TheServiceDesk
Data foundations building success, at city scale
Gartner Symposium – 7 November 2022
Juan Villamil, CIO Mark Woods, Chief Technical Advisor
Splunk
EMEA
www.splunk.com
Notas del editor
Universities have more in common with modern cities than traditional places of learning. This mini city needs to empower its citizens to thrive and achieve their ambitions.
Operationalising data is key to building critical services; from understanding complex IT estates for smarter decision-making to robust security and a more reliable, resilient student experience.
Global Uni - We are amongst the top ranked universities with an international community, attracting undergraduates from around 132 countries.
University of the year – The Times 2022 and The Guardian 2023
Our sprawling campus consists of accommodations, a sports centre libraries, a conference centre, research facilities and eating establishments — not to mention lecture halls and classrooms.
So with all the people, campuses, infrastructure, and innovation – how do we in the IT team enable and empower our citizens to achieve their ambitions and ensure a safe, resilient student experience?
New White City Campus - A new co-located collaborative environment for research, education, and entrepreneurship focused on artificial intelligence, data science and digital technologies
The College has amazing ambitions, with many of Imperial’s strategies extensively referring to digital goals.
As well as delivering activities and initiatives that enable College to achieve its strategic goals - we constantly monitor and maintain the complex network of systems and services that keep it up and running.
Maintain competitiveness through embedding cutting-edge, emerging technology for great customer-experience, whilst generating new revenue opportunities
Minimise & mitigate Imperial Colleges’ technology risks and operational challenges through modernisation
Maximise cost effectiveness and reduce cost sprawl and total cost of ownership for solutions across Imperial College
Improve agility and pace of delivery cycles of ICT products and services
The ability to organise
As the mini city grows and develops – silos emerge, and it is hard to keep accurate, secure and unified data. So we are building a Unified Data Platform for the Business to manage their data.
We are using Splunk to manage services around; monitoring, security, usability via user analytics,
Looking to create the unified data platform. Core services and build.
Point 3 – EXAMPLE - the Dark Web issue where accounts were found on dark web and we used live data to identify accounts very swiftly.
Growing our capabilities - Splunk has grown from a very small security install of one licence, to compute model (400GB daily) in the Cloud in 2 years, because we recognise that we can achieve more with monitoring and other analytics services.
Grow capabilities to address them
Started small, utlizing what we already had in security – kept asking "what more can we do" - moving to a flexible model leveraging things we can do extra in the cloud
Dashboards supporting migrations - showing which services run on Windows 2012 or have databases on a Windows 2012 SQL Instance, support products owners so they know which services need migrating and potentially how much work is involved.
Digital accessibility support using Google Lighthouse to test our web pages, the Digital Accessibility scores are analysed and presented in Splunk for the Digital Accessibility Office to identify pages where we may fail our regulatory responsibilities.
Insights and usage tracking - During COVID we used the data to support the College through usage data from our students across the globe – even as far as Mongolia! Tracking usage of our remote access services to support managing capacity
Risks - Splunk and ES support the security team and their work to discovery and analysis security risks. Service Risk View - bringing together different security aspects to give us a risk score for each of the services we run, this can then be used by Product Owners to prioritise work
University teams are now able to quickly remedy any incidents and share insights across the organization for smarter decision-making, uncompromised security and a more reliable, resilient student experience.
Bring back to mini city – top level and what the strategy talk about data as a foundation / data as a city people, process and technology
Engagement for growth but always on business value which leads to future landscaping