From the CIO

September 2024 CIO Update

Happy Fall, y’all! As I write this it’s still 85 degrees out, but it is definitely starting to look like Fall here at VCU. We are now in the home stretch of our network and data center migration from the Pocahontas building to the new Technology Operations Center, and we continue to make progress on multiple projects and initiatives. For this month’s entry, I’d like to share an update from the data network team as well as provide some information about VCU’s DMARC initiative from the Collaboration Services team.

Fall 2024 Network View

Over the past 12+ months, the Infrastructure Services team at VCU has been busy building advanced networks to support the new more modern data center located in the newly-built Technology Operations Center (TOC). This has been a major undertaking in and of itself not to mention keeping the network and data centers at Poca and Harris Hall functioning normally at the same time.  From the beginning a motto was developed: “If we do it right, no one will know.”  For the most part this has rung true due to the many hours of preparation and middle-of-the-night network changes.

As part of outfitting the new data center, we have deployed an entire new MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network core, and in the process, we have more than doubled its speed and capacity from 40Gbps to 100Gbps. New edge switches and internet routers were also deployed that now allow 100Gbps bandwidth utilization for network traffic headed over to the internet.  The internal firewall-facing routers were all upgraded with 100Gbps links, and half of them were moved into the new TOC data center. This allowed us to build a new data center fabric that provides us the ability to move workloads from one data center to another reliably and quickly. The majority of this work was done after the end of the spring semester in May.

As we close in on the finish line of this historical project there are still a number of milestones to reach, but we are seeing the benefits of this work now as we look at the amount of volume the network has handled at the start of the fall semester. The newly installed edge switches and the internet routers downloaded from the internet 59.0 TeraBytes (TB) of data and uploaded 12.1 TB on Aug 19th, 2024 (as shown above) .  To give this some context, during the end of the last semester’s finals week, we saw 45.5 TB of downloads and 17.9 TB of uploads. Before the start of this year’s fall semester, we saw 27.9 TB of downloads and 6.7 TB of uploads. Our network continues to deliver!

DMARC Initiative

The Collaboration Services team is working toward bringing VCU’s email into DMARC compliance. DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. It’s a powerful tool that helps combat phishing scams and safeguard inboxes.

By default, anyone can send an email pretending to be someone else. 90%+ of all cyber attacks involve fake email. The VCU community is continually plagued with fake job offers and a variety of phishing scams that can result in the loss of personal and university money. Implementing DMARC will address VCU’s email identity crisis by halting the use of our vcu.edu domain and subdomains unless properly authenticated. 

The Collaboration Services team engaged Dmarcian in January, 2024. The insight gained through the use of Dmarcian’s dashboard and tools has allowed us to see more clearly what is happening “behind the curtain” of inbound email. We’ve identified around 75 active communication platforms and university services that were not properly configured to send outbound email, which could result in them being quarantined or rejected by others enforcing DMARC policy. Working together, the Network Services and Collaboration Services teams have made the necessary DNS entries and configuration changes to bring these senders into DMARC compliance. 

We are gradually implementing DMARC to minimize disruption for users. We’ve monitored since January and worked directly with mass mail senders to bring them into compliance. By the end of September, we’ll begin quarantining 25% of unauthenticated emails and gradually increase this until we begin rejecting 100% of unauthenticated email in January, 2025. The rollout is designed to ensure minimal impact on the user’s email experience. DMARC itself won’t cause delays in receiving legitimate emails. As we move toward full compliance, we will see these threat actors sending as vcu.edu from around the world diminish.

Learn more about DMARC and related email security protocols like SPF and DKIM at https://go.vcu.edu/DMARC.

Thanks to all of the TS staff involved for their outstanding efforts in the above initiatives! This is of course only a small part of the work that has been done as VCU enters a busy Fall Semester. I am continually amazed and humbled by what our teams accomplish!

Alex