Department Spotlight: Enterprise and Cloud Services

Department Spotlight

Enterprise and Cloud Services department

By Erick Camacho

Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) is a department of the ITS division and is the technology backbone of California State University, San Bernardino. ECS department specializes in supporting the integrity of California State University, San Bernardino online service systems, providing the foundation for both its physical and private cloud server infrastructure.

The department does this via the careful collocation of physical servers, which make up the university’s Campus Data Center, which is a fixed location on campus that provides physical and virtual server hosting, enterprise storage, backup services, network, and monitoring services. Currently, ECS supports over 450 virtual servers and over 100 physical servers from different departments across campus.

ECS team oversees and provide support to multiple enterprise applications that have a direct impact on faculty, staff and student success. Some of these applications include Office 365 and Google email systems administration to mention some.

Operations Systems Analyst, Gerardo Garcia-Sotelo, who helps lead the department with a combination of different people, said via email that ECS also helps to process scantron examination scores and SOTE student evaluation forms, the latter of which are used by department heads when holding annual reviews with university professors.

Garcia-Sotelo acknowledged that professors gain access to SOTE evaluations once the process is completed, which they can use to help improve upon their own teaching capabilities.

“The SOTE information can be productively used by the instructors to improve their quality of instruction on specific areas mentioned by students on the surveys,” Garcia-Sotelo said. “[If taken constructively], they can assist the instructor to be better on what he/she loves to do —teach and educate.”

In an effort to build toward a future that is efficient, robust, and transparent, however, Garcia-Sotelo explains that part of what the ECS department is now also in charge of includes restructuring and refortifying current online infrastructure, either via system retirement or through the improvement of its system functionality.

“We know we will need to be ready to support thousands, and perhaps millions of data collection and automation devices,” Garcia-Sotelo said. “This is causing us to rethink how our network is structured and how [our] services are modeled.”

Currently, the ECS department is working on integrating CSUSB into the high-speed research network known as the Pacific Research Platform, a project which intends to support, inspire, and motivate current CSUSB scientists and faculty researchers obtain and publish large data sets for scientific study or investigation.

Students, staff, and faculty can contact the Enterprise and Cloud Services Department via the Technology Support Center at support@csusb.edu, 24/7 via phone (909) 537-7677, or via walk-in in PL-022.