Maintaining Moodle, Supporting Students: The Importance of IT Services at StFX

Every day, it seems as though student and faculty inboxes are filled with at least one email from IT Services at StFX. Whether it be a ‘Firewall Maintenance’ reminder, or an email outlining that there will be an ‘outage from 4 am to 6am’, it seems as though there is always something happening in the IT world here at StFX.  

Every student, for one reason or another, has stopped by the IT services desk. And every time there is a crew of helpful voices there to help. In a digital time where online classes are offered and most students work, take notes, and study on their computers, it makes sense that the campus IT department is always on the foreground of issues. When students are concerned with setting up their student account, resetting passwords, or even the ultimate struggle: connecting your computer to a printer, IT is there.  

But most of the time, IT’s emails don’t really affect the student body: (what does firewall maintenance even mean?) and therefore most emails can be scanned but ultimately ignored. Yet that’s not always the case. On Wednesday Oct 21st, IT services sent out an Urgent Notice Email that Moodle would be taken offline that afternoon for a “Critical Security Vulnerability”. While the maintenance was completed, students, professors and everyone who uses the database were locked out during the height of midterm season.  

The “temporary outage” as Cindy Mackenzie, the manager of Media Relations, expressed was viewed as a ‘cyberattack’, but Cindy confirmed that “Moodle was not attacked, the system was taken offline as a precaution”. The action taken by IT Services speaks to the larger network at hand. Moodle’s hosting provider, Catalyst, alongside IT Services made the decisions to take Moodle offline. As Cindy outlined, there is a far larger network of people and companies making decisions to fix the behind the services students use every day.   

This issue presented what can only be described as a representation of the importance of our IT Services. Not just for our everyday password needs, but for the greater of education at StFX at large. What was so timely about this hiccup in the regularly scheduled programming of daily classes was that it happened during Cyber Security Month. 

This past week StFX Internet and Technology Services presented their fifth and final week of Cyber Security Awareness Month. Through various initiatives such as campus talks, training courses and weekly prize draws, there is an active effort from the technology services here at StFX to protect our students and staff online. The goal they set out to achieve was awareness on campus, and they were able to succeed by connecting with the student body through these outreach initiatives. 

In light of the constant necessity of IT services, as the issue involving Moodle highlighted, it only becomes ever more apparent the importance of IT Services at StFX. The goal of week five of Cyber Security Month was “build your cyber security community”, and it is a theme that carries on throughout StFX and its technological services. From when Moodle is taken offline, to when your computer won’t connect to the printer, it is crucial to recognize the importance of IT services, and the greater cyber security network that StFX supports to keep students, staff, and faculty safe.