Documents Contributed by ECAR, Business Continuity Planning, and Collaboration

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the benefits of multi-institutional development of a ubiquitously needed IT service. By leveraging emerging technology, procurement opportunities, and internal resources, the University of California Office of the President and University of California, San Diego were able to develop a complex disaster recovery solution involving the joint hosting and comprehensive mirroring of each location’s mainframe and non-mainframe computing environments.

This ECAR research bulletin addresses a unique strength of higher education: its commitment to sharing ideas and promoting open access to knowledge. These values shape IT in higher education as well, as evidenced by many high-profile collaborations such as the Internet, Internet2, and open or community source applications such as Sakai and Kuali. Institutions work with one another on a broad range of projects and services including wide area networking, shared data centers, or disaster recovery. Some institutions share staff, while others outsource their IT operation to a fellow institution. Using findings from the 2007 ECAR study on IT collaboration, this bulletin explores the challenges that suggest that collaboration may become an even more prevalent strategy in the future.

This case study examines ways in which the Virginia Alliance for Secure Computing and Networking (VA SCAN) provides a blueprint for higher education institutions interested in collaboratively providing openly accessible IT security resources. VA SCAN is a partnership among five Virginia state higher education institutions and three IT security research programs that provide a repository of IT security tools, training, and consultative services to Virginia higher education institutions. All of the resources are available for free or on a cost-recovery basis. The case study was undertaken as part of ECAR's 2006 study of information technology security practices in higher education, which included a literature review, quantitative and qualitative date from 492 higher education institutions in the U.S. and Canada, input from IT security leaders and specialists, and three case studies.