Introduction

Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) is currently in a time of great change. As we emerge from two years of business disruption resulting from a worldwide pandemic, new ways of working have come to the forefront out of necessity and become persistent. Hybrid work has driven computing to be more mobile and shifted services to the cloud. On top of this have come significant and long-lasting supply chain disruptions and increased security risks from persistent actors, some state-sponsored. This has created an environment where

…the “new normal” is disruption. Organizations that lean into this reality and leverage their innovation capacity, technology, and reach to deliver the scale and pace needed to achieve enterprise goals, will out-deliver their peers. They will not only survive, but grow as a result, and stay ahead of the pack.
Gartner. 2021. CIO Agenda.

IT leaders across the world responded to these pressures in 2021 by increasing investments in data security (73%), cloud technologies and services (71%), and IT automation (68%) (Forbes. 2021. State of IT Observability in 2021).

Clearly, NIS is ending one phase of growth and entering another. This calls for an adjustment in the focus of our work to better serve our customers for the foreseeable future.

External Challenges

Changes in the work and technology environments, largely resulting from the pandemic, have affected the external IT landscape. These changes include:

Changing employee expectations for work: The pandemic has necessitated the development of hybrid work environments, creating a permanent shift to more mobile technologies. Prior to the pandemic, 80% of our employees were working exclusively from a TTI office location. Today, 10% of employees prefer to work exclusively from a TTI office. Furthermore, competition for well-qualified candidates has created an expectation that work environments will be flexible from this point onward. Greater hybrid work necessitates greater technology mobility.
Increased concern for security: Security incidents by persistent state-sponsored cyber-hacking organizations is at an all-time high. Members of the TAMU System have been specifically targeted. Risk and Compliance activities have kept pace with the increased threat and greatly increased the compliance landscape. For example, in the last 18 months, the State of Texas DIR has changed or added 142 new security controls necessitating a significant increase in operational work to remain compliant.
Growth of cloud services: Worldwide, cloud services are growing. The global cloud computing market size is expected to grow from $445.3 billion in 2021 to $947.3 billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.3%.[i] Costs are coming down and making cloud services a viable alternative to on-premise infrastructure. When comparing the total cost of ownership of on-premise infrastructure, continuing to maintain it, especially for smaller IT organizations, is becoming more difficult.
Growth of the RELLIS Campus: With the growth of the RELLIS campus, a new IT networking group will be stood up to maintain the campus network in the future. There are significant costs associated with this shift of operational work away from TTI NIS to the main campus.

Internal Challenges

The internal IT landscape has also provided its own set of challenges, including:

Increased competition for budget: The budget continues to be flat and indicates that IT services must be cost-neutral if possible. This will create challenges, especially in the security area where demand for security monitoring and compliance has dramatically increased in recent years.
Increased demand for research IT services: As the complexity of IT services has gone up and shifted to the cloud, the demand for updated skill sets has also gone up. Historically, research groups have “rolled their own” with variable effects. This has decentralized the management of many IT services to the research teams. Once services are in production, these teams have limited capacity to manage services, sometimes resorting to hiring embedded IT team members to keep up with the operational demand. These resources are generally not engaged with NIS nor in the IT security community. As a result, these research-managed IT services present significant IT risks including security, availability, and continuity.
Increased compliance requirements: As a result of elevated security threats, compliance requirements have increased as well. Staying abreast of compliance requirements, not to mention complying with them, will require more resources in the future than are currently available.

An effective strategic plan must honestly evaluate where NIS is now while adjusting to the changing external and internal challenges we face. In so doing, we must shift our perspective so we can take advantage of our position as a skilled and knowledgeable provider of IT services.

Perspective

The vision of NIS, as defined in the 2016 Strategic Plan, is:

Network and Information Systems (NIS) will be recognized as a customer-service organization focused on embracing new technologies and delivering highly reliable and scalable applications as well as the infrastructure to power them. This infrastructure will allow the agency to achieve its strategic imperatives by having access to the latest information, tools and training, while protecting the agency’s resources in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.

Using this as a starting point, simplifying, and emphasizing the value of both administrative and research computing to better align with customer expectations:

We create an environment for researcher success by providing secure, reliable, and innovative administrative and research technology solutions to our customers.

Value consists of both utility (functionality) and warranty (availability, capacity, continuity, and security). And so, this new perspective more closely aligns with our customer’s definition of value.

Positions

Cloud-First Philosophy

TTI has significant, expensive, and aging on-premise assets including storage, compute, and networking. The operational overhead of owning and maintaining hard infrastructure assets when considering the total cost of ownership has crossed a rubicon when compared with cloud services. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, much of the agency’s on-premise infrastructure has been moved to the cloud. While some will remain, our strategy will be to move the on-premise assets to other providers such as Microsoft Azure, the RELLIS Computing and Data Research Center (i.e., RCDRC), and the RELLIS Networking group.

Strategic Principle #1: Move existing on-premise assets to the cloud where appropriate.