ISC Cloud First Update
July 2017

In this update, we focus on FY 2018 goals, recent progress, new web content,
and an upcoming cloud-related event.

FY 2018 Goals

July marks the completion of the Cloud First program’s first year of activities. Following are the program’s target goals for fiscal year 2018: 

• Refine the data backup and disaster recovery processes that support both on-premises and cloud deployments allowing for maximum agility and recoverability
• Determine the strategy for campus-independent central authentication services and execute the strategy
• Support automated and tested continuous deployments in the cloud-native framework
• Develop an automated testing methodology for Penn-developed, cloud-native applications

Recent Progress

The Application Design & Tools team has completed a general release of the Penn Virtual Desktop Portal to the cloud and provided key findings and recommendations. The team continues development of the cloud-native version of the Online Giving application and has begun work on the Penn Device Portal, which will streamline registering personal devices on AirPennNet.

The Integration team used the Talend ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool to provide near real-time data replication between ATLAS and the Online Giving cloud application. The team is analyzing next potential services to migrate to the cloud while meeting with the Ben Financials, Human Capital Management, and Banner teams to assess their integration needs.

The Architecture, Infrastructure, & Migration team has moved more than 200 instances of existing test and development server workloads to VMware vCloud Air to date. The team has also implemented Direct Connect, a high-speed connection that improves performance between our Data Center and vCloud Air.

New Web Content

We are excited to unveil the following new content:

• Cloud First Application Delivery Refresh Recommendations – Key findings from the team’s post-project retrospective following the initial pilot release of the VDI Ordering Portal to the cloud
• Leveraging AWS for Infrastructure Excellence (video) – Panel discussion from the Penn IT Staff Convention on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in use on campus, including benefits, challenges, and recommendations for success
• How Technical Professionals Can Overcome the Top Five Challenges of Adopting SaaS – Recent Gartner article on SaaS challenges, solutions, and recommendations added to the Planning & Strategies section of the Cloud Resources website 
  

Upcoming Cloud-Related Event

Following is an upcoming Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting that will feature a cloud-related presentation:

• Developer SIG (7/17) – RESTful Web Services Available to the Penn Community – Discussion and demo of tools built for rapidly integrating Penn Community with systems across campus via web services, file extracts, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  

Visit the Cloud First Website

For the latest developments on the Cloud First program, including links to team pages, presentations, and updates, please visit the Cloud First website.

The Cloud First team values your feedback. Please direct questions, comments, or suggestions to cloud‑first@isc.upenn.edu.

We look forward to sharing more progress with you soon!

The ISC Cloud First Team