Information Technology Services > About ITS > 2023 Accreditation Submission Introduction > Technology Systems and Infrastructure Accomplishments

2023 Accreditation Submission

Technology Systems and Infrastructure Accomplishments

WSU Wireless and Guest Wi-Fi

ITS now offers universal access to WSU Wireless services for multiple campuses across the WSU system. Students and faculty can visit Pullman, Spokane, Everett, Vancouver, or the Tri-Cities campuses and retain instant connectivity through their already established WSU credentials.

WSU Pullman migrated to an open, self-service resource in a true guest wireless, allowing registration in a matter of moments directly from a person’s device for the first time in WSU history, including IoT for users within WSU Pullman housing, visiting family, and WSU affiliates. ITS continues to enhance this service, more than doubling connectivity access points from 2,283 in 2016 to over 4,600 across Pullman’s campus today.

Infrastructure Services

A new wide area network (WAN) providing dedicated internet connections linking all the state campuses together. Implemented in spring 2023, WSUNet offers improved WSU community access for video conferencing and streaming classes. Offering researchers state of the art connectivity, the new WAN will save WSU an estimated $245,000 per year.

ITS implemented new infrastructure and storage to support a secondary data canter in Pullman, replaced aging datacenter switching, routing, and firewall resources in ITS’ primary data center.

ITS also invested in new server and networking infrastructure to support existing and future WSU business and academic tools including Skype for Business, Microsoft communication services, mainframe computing, virtual servers, WSU’s high-performance computer, Kamiak, wired and wireless access, email and calendaring, voice, and telephone services.

ITS redesigned WSU’s internet connectivity architecture, employing K20 to double the bandwidth for Pullman. The infrastructure team also transferred all Pullman data and voice network services from the current decade-old, 10-gigabit-per-second equipment to new 100-gigabit-per-second campus infrastructure equipment.

Deployed for the first time in a WSU research facility, ITS supported an entirely fiber optic-based LAN technology, Gigabit Passive Optical Networking (GPON).

Move to Cloud Resources

  • myWSU: ITS moved its student information system (SIS), myWSU from Oracle to cloud provider AWS. Benefits include reduced slowdowns during peak periods such as term starts. The move also offers improved platform security, timely updates, and improved system integration thanks to stronger hosting capabilities.
  • Canvas: Following a two-year planning process, WSU moved to the new cloud-based Canvas learning management system (LMS). Moving to Canvas offered improved user experience through continued updates and responsive solutions. including automatic sync of information and grades between the LMS and student information system, myWSU.
  • Zoom: This cloud-based telecommunications tool eliminates aging hardware and numerous duplicated services costing the university hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual operating and maintenance costs, allowing ITS to focus on quality of service. Zoom quickly showed its reliability in the successful transition to remote learning during Covid and beyond with 99.99% uptime. WSU’s top simultaneous meetings since adoption occurred in Nov. 2022 with 525 groups all meeting via WSU Zoom at the same time: more than 100 times the capacity of legacy infrastructure, and at a fraction of the cost.
  • Teams: WSU’s adoption of Microsoft Teams paralleled Zoom’s critical support of university collaboration, teaching, and business. Today thousands of WSU users are active daily in the software, and more than 80,000 meetings, 85,000 calls, and millions of work- and teaching-related chats take place each year, allowing timely flow of information regardless of work and teaching location.
  • WSU Email: A multi-phase Office 365 email migration project replaced seven different departmental WSU email services, rolling them all into one centralized cloud-based service, Office 365 Exchange Online. Over the course of a year, the implementation team coordinated the transfer of millions of active and archived email records for each group individually, to ensure continuity of information access during the transition.