As illustrated by recent events, a variety of external factors can dramatically impact Stanford’s ability to sustain operations. Whether it’s a power outage, an Amazon Web Services regional failure, or a Slack service outage, our core work applications can be compromised.
When faced with these types of disruptions, an elevated level of response is required by University IT (UIT), in collaboration with our campus community partners.
The UIT Department Operations Center (DOC) is a process and group that assembles to address escalated incidents that impact delivery of IT services to the Stanford community. The UIT DOC is one of 25 DOCs across the university that fits into a larger, campus-wide emergency response.
Working across teams in UIT, the DOC pulls together the necessary resources to address an incident and to communicate toward timely and well-informed resolution and restoration of services to both the distributed IT community and our campus community as a whole.
How to Stay Informed
To ensure you are on top of the latest communications related to outages and key service-impacting events, you can self-subscribe on Slack to the #uit-alerts and #itoc channels for the latest news and updates. For information from Energy Operations on events, power and thermal energy alerts, curtailments and status updates, you can self-subscribe to the #energy_operations_information channel.
If email is your preferred communication channel, you can subscribe to service alerts. Emails are sent for new and resolved outages, as well as updates while the event is active. As a result, email activity can sometimes be heavy.
Lastly, when an escalated incident is underway, the UIT homepage banner links to a service alert page with a running account of the information shared through service alerts.
The UIT DOC plan is reviewed, refined, and recalibrated after each event, and we continue to test the plan regularly to ensure we provide the best response possible to our campus community.
We appreciate your partnership and feedback as we navigate these outages together. Please contact Julie Schloss (jsim@stanford.edu), Manager of IT Resilience, to learn more.
