Cybersecurity, personnel recruitment priorities for VP

Now down to 106 budgeted positions, the division is taking full advantage of the efficiencies gained through the consolidation, however, and is still able to service all of campus, said UW Vice President of Information Technology Robert Aylward.

“We had a total reduction of 32 positions,” he said. “We have adjusted quite well, I would say, to that reduction with very limited degradation and any type of services or support. In fact, in many areas I think we improved our support.”

Aylward presented his division’s budget to a UW Board of Trustees committee May 8 — the second of two days during which the trustees’ biennium budget committee reviews the proposed budget of each division on campus.

Previously, all divisions submitted their proposed budgets to UW President Laurie Nichols, who decided which exception requests to include in the compiled, university-wide budget being considered now by the Board of Trustees.

In the division budget Aylward presented to administration, UW IT requested funding for two currently filled positions and two vacant positions. The request was denied and not included in the president’s proposed budget.

During the hearing, Trustee Dick Scarlett said he wanted to stress the importance of personnel.

“I advise you to have one too many people because you’re always going to lose people,” Scarlett said to Aylward. “If you find the right people, hire them.”

In a rapidly changing and expanding field such as IT, recruitment can be difficult, Aylward said.

“To be able to maintain and get quality personnel is difficult in information technology,” he said. “We don’t compete with other higher education institutions for our employees. We compete with the commercial sector — and that commercial sector is now even in Laramie.”

Aylward said advances in technology work as a counterbalance to this difficulty, naturally creating efficiencies that decrease the demand for some personnel. The division is also hoping to guide students into one day taking IT positions at UW.

“One of the things that we’re focusing on in this next year in particular is trying to create a better pipeline for students,” Aylward said. “The hard part on the personnel is really forecasting where the need will be as technology changes,” he said.

The shifting demands of the field are reflected in some of the expansions IT saw during fiscal year 2018, even as it implemented these changes with fewer personnel.

“In 2016, we had 1,200 (wireless) access points on campus,” Aylward said. “We now currently have over 2,000 access points on campus and we’re still not done. We’ll continue to add more access points in this coming fiscal year.”

He added the division tripled the size of its high-performance computer, stood up a software center, increased the efficiency of its dispatch service and continued to work on the implementation of WyoCloud, the university’s new financial management system.

Aylward also discussed the ever-increasing need for greater cybersecurity.

“We take security very seriously and always have,” he said. “But anybody that tells you you will not get breached is naive because as good as your security is, you can still be breached.”

Aylward added that while UW has not been breached before, it does deny 50 million potentially harmful connections a day.

“There’s some technical reasons why those connections were denied,” he said. “But a lot of those connections are denied because there are just automated botnets and programs out there that constantly scan for vulnerabilities.”

Trustee Kermit Brown said the issue of cybersecurity was paramount to the functioning of UW.

“I can tell you this is one trustee who would never want to have security compromised by budget constraints,” he said. “I just don’t want to go there.”