What We Offer
Let us help you find the right solution.
We want to work with you to solve your business problems, not simply install and manage your IT solutions. We have over half a decade of experience working with the major cloud providers and have pre-negotiated agreements offering favorable terms for our customers. UCF IT has spent significant time and effort properly implementing security features and integrating our cloud environments with existing network and authentication systems. Our Information Security Office has vetted hundreds of SaaS solutions and we know the right questions to ask to ensure university data is not being put at unnecessary risk.
Let us put our cloud knowledge and experience to work for you. Spend less of your time and effort on IT so we can all focus on our common goal to positively impact higher education through scale and excellence.
Contact your department’s Business Relationship Manager to get started.
Cloud Consultation
We will always seek to use whichever cloud provider best meets your specific needs based on our ability to deliver that solution.
Do you have questions about cloud? Do you have a business problem and wondering if a cloud-based solution may be the answer? Do you have a cloud solution in mind but you’re not sure where to go next? Our cloud team is here to help with a free one hour consultation to assist with cloud adoption, architecture review, design, security, best practices, and recommendations. Our goal is to provide the appropriate cloud solution based on your unique business needs.
Software In the Cloud
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is our recommended cloud model of choice whenever possible.
To ensure the most efficient use of UCF IT resources and deliver solutions designed to meet the diverse needs of our customers, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is our recommended cloud model of choice whenever possible. However, there are many technical, legal, and service considerations that may not be clear from a vendor’s description. UCF is a complicated environment for system implementations and the university has requirements that may be unfamiliar, even to vendors who have worked with other higher education clients.
To help you navigate these challenges, UCF’s Information Security Office has established a Vendor Risk Management (VRM) review process. This assessment is required for any department or business unit contracting with a third party service provider for the purposes of storing, transmitting, processing, or collecting university data on our behalf.
How do you know if a specific SaaS solution is the right for you?
If you’re not sure whether a specific SaaS solution may be right for you, UCF IT is here to help. Based on our experience working with many types of providers, we’ve gathered some questions you should consider before moving forward with a SaaS solution. We encourage you to address them directly with the provider and make sure you’re comfortable with the answers provided.
SUPPORTED Providers
Before you begin the process of searching for a cloud solution provider to meet your specific needs, it may be helpful to find out whether the university already has a relationship with an existing vendor. By avoiding duplication of service offerings, you can get up and running sooner and support our goals for operational efficiency.
Below are some of our key providers that have pre-negotiated agreements with UCF and provide strategic value to the university.
Microsoft Office 365
Email, File Sharing, Unified Communication, Content Management, Business Intelligence
Salesforce
Customer Relationship Management
Canvas
Learning Management System
ServiceNow
Service Lifecycle & Incident Management
Workday
Enterprise Resource Planning
Panopto
Video Lecture Capture
Qualtrics
Survey & Experience Management
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is our preferred provider for cloud computing IaaS and PaaS services. Our team has years of experience and knowledge within this platform and the university has made significant investments to ensure tight integrations with existing authentication systems and network services. We’ve built a robust, scalable, highly-available, and secure environment to handle a variety of customer workloads.
Through our architecture process, we can work with you to implement a fully-supported and cost-optimized solution. For those who prefer to manage their own resources, we can also provision space within our existing secure environment for you to build whatever you need.
Other advantages include:
- More compliance certifications than any other cloud provider
- Datacenter availability in more regions than AWS and Google combined
- Direct access to a range of Microsoft technical and training experts
- Multiple Azure-certified team members on staff
- Up-front cost estimates and ongoing cost management through Apptio Cloudability
- Easy and inexpensive access to testing environments and resources
Available Services
- Virtual Machines – Provision Windows and Linux virtual machines
- Storage – Durable, highly available, and massively scalable cloud storage
- Ultra SSD – Storage for IO intensive workloads with low latency and high throughput needs
- Archive Storage – For storing rarely accessed data
- Azure Files – Serverless managed files shares
- Azure SQL and MySQL – Managed, intelligent, and scalable cloud databases
- Azure Backup – Simplify data protection and protect against ransomware
- Azure CycleCloud – HPC orchestration, scheduling, and management
- Traffic Manager – Optimally route DNS traffic, providing high availability and responsiveness
- Azure DNS – Host your non-EDU domain in Azure
- Content Delivery Network – Ensure secure, reliable content delivery with broad global reach
- QnA Maker – Create a conversational chatbot layer over your existing data
- Data Box – Secure, ruggedized appliance for bulk data transfer into Azure
AMAZON WEB SERVICES
The Center for Distributed Learning, a division of Digital Learning, has been gaining knowledge and experience in AWS since 2012. Beginning with a handful of application integrations into UCF’s Canvas Learning Management System, our team of over two dozen engineers have gone on to develop a wide range of highly available, scalable, and resilient services using the latest AWS technologies that serve the entire university community.
Thanks to our negotiated agreement with Amazon Web Services, UCF IT is now offering customers the option to provision their own AWS account with simple pass-through billing and in compliance with university procurement policies. We will also suggest best practices and offer access to dedicated AWS solution architects for those requiring additional assistance. Other benefits include:
- Baseline security, auditing, and compliance policies delivered through a UCF IT managed AWS Organization
- Favorable terms and conditions specifically designed for higher education
- Tax exemption, volume discounting, and consolidated billing for eligible AWS spending
- Integration with university identity access management for the AWS management console
- Pre-configured budget alerting to notify you of potential overspending
- Access to a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for highly regulated workloads
VMWare Private Cloud
For those applications and workloads where public cloud isn’t the right fit, we’ve built a state-of-the-art, hyper-converged private cloud environment at a nearby colocation facility employing the latest VMware virtualization and automation technologies. This highly secure, Tier 4 datacenter includes several advantages not traditionally found on campus such as redundant and independent sources of power, cooling, and networking. For data that needs to stay on university-managed hardware, this location meets all physical security requirements for HIPAA, PCI, and various levels of NIST compliance.
Our dedicated VMware team has designed this environment to maximize reliability, performance, and capacity:
- Over 600 terabytes of solid-state, high speed flash storage
- Almost 11 terabytes of integrated memory
- Computing power equivalent to 900 high performance processors
- Sub-five millisecond latency for maximum responsiveness to on-campus resources
- Automated delivery of the latest patches, enhancements, and updates