The goal of all university IT, both central and distributed, is to ensure the secure and robust operation of institutional IT assets for our UConn community. This shared responsibility is the impetus behind the recent initiative to review academic servers.  The relationship between central and distributed IT is, at times, complicated, and the university certainly has some needs that are unique.  However, it is our collective obligation to reduce unnecessary duplication of services and to mitigate institutional risk.  The IT Technical Partners governance body has met to discuss a general framework to develop, in concert with the community, a more consistent and better integrated set of best practices around IT systems, services, and capabilities.  ITS and the governance body are currently developing policies, standards, and guidelines that will codify and document these practices, and you can better inform this process by beginning a self-assessment to identify duplicated services and points of possible exposure.  The status of this initiative, as well as additional information and instructions, will soon be readily available via network resources and in IT Technical Partner meetings.  Additional information about the IT Partners Program and the date of the next meeting is available at http://itp.uconn.edu/.

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