Texas A&M’s information technology department is in the process of moving more than 37,000 employee e-mail accounts to a new platform.
The move to Microsoft 365 was among the topics discussed during the July meeting of A&M’s faculty senate meeting by interim I-T vice president and chief information officer Ed Pierson.
Pierson also said A&M students will continue to be connected to the Google platform. Pierson has also been keeping tabs on when Google will start charging for services that are currently free.
Pierson said the department spent the summer for a return to in-person instruction after adjusting to remote learning during the pandemic last year. That included the flagship campus having a total of 8,700 wireless access points by September.
Another online priority is security. Pierson says isolated online environments have gone away.
Pierson’s presentation also shared the following statistics of A&M’s I-T department:
The department protects more than 787,000 active identities.
There are more than 44,000 unique devices on the A&M network each day, using 4,000 miles of a campus cable network that is equivalent to driving from College Station to Spokane Washington and back.
A&M’s I-T network processes 220 million e-mails each month. If each e-mail is printed on one sheet of paper, the monthly stack would be more than 13 miles tall.
A&M’s I-T department blocks over 20 billion attacks each month, blocks over 30 million malicious e-mails each month, and more than six million files are scanned for classified and sensitive information each month.
Click below for comments from Ed Pierson during the July 12, 2021 Texas A&M faculty senate meeting.
Listen to “Texas A&M faculty senate hears about I-T projects” on Spreaker.