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IT Technical Operations

The folks at IT Technical Operations provide front-line and extended
support for all of the District-issued endpoints, as well as the ordering,
staging and distribution of all devices. In addition to the efforts detailed
above to support distance learning and remote work, they maintain primary
responsibility for the District’s data centers.

In the Fall, our long-time IT Technical Operations Director, Chris Persuad,
left the District to pursue other opportunities. Chris’ hard work and
dedication over the years helped to build a robust team of professionals
and support processes. He will be missed and we wish him all the best!
(Full article here)

As part of the transition, IT took the opportunity to realign some teams
with a different department to better suit their work functions. The Active
Directory and Endpoint teams were moved to Enterprise Applications
under new IT Manager, Ricky Saturnini.

Beyond the tremendous challenges faced with the Chromebook
Acquisition/Deployment for Students Project, the team has also
maintained their core support functions. Initiatives like the Carbon Black
Endpoint Management Upgrade (Full article here) and Laptop Hard
Drive Encryption Project have increased our endpoint security and will
help mitigate future audit findings.

Here are some of the efforts undertaken by the
IT Technical Operations team:

• District 1:1 Initiative - deployed 80,000+ student devices to support
the District initiative for a 1:1 student to device ratio for FY21
• T-Mobile Transition - managed the transition of cellular carriers from
Sprint to T-Mobile for the FY21 school year. This enables the hotspot
initiative for students without devices (Full article here)
• LANdesk 2020.1 Upgrade - Achieve support of the latest version of MS
Windows
• SITV Power Redundancy - Improve the power redundancy for the SITV
Data Center by implementing a generator in the FY21 school year
(Full article here)

IT Security

Securing District systems, applications and infrastructure has been a major
focus this past year. As I’m sure you’ve seen and read, more and more
public organizations are being targeted for hacks, phishing and other
attempts at compromising our systems and data. While we have been
security-focused for a number of years, we were able in 2020 to implement
several initiatives that greatly improved our ability to deter, monitor and
respond to suspicious activity across our network. The first of these was
Next-Gen Content Filtering that allows us to filter content and access for
District devices, even when they’re not connected to the District network

Another crucial security project involved the rapid deployment of a new
Carbon Black Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) Solution to
further harden device security at the user level. Scoped, acquired and
implemented in near-record time, this solution provides much more robust
detection, monitoring and response capabilities at the endpoint, making it
easier to spot, stop and contain potential breaches before they spread. As
a VMWare companion product, it makes integration with our existing virtual
and physical environments more seamless (Full article here)

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