“Where we worry is if someone sticks a thumb drive in it and tries to download data–[but] we have routines to protect that,” Thirsk said.
Marist College has up to 7,000 people within the college using the network. Overall, Marist manages 130,000 eMail accounts; however, not everyone logs in at once.
“The worst thing that could happen is the internet connection could go down through some provider. And that does happen from time to time,” Thirsk said. “If you are a cloud provider or cloud user, and someone’s network goes down or their internet connection gets cut, you are out of business for a while until it comes back up.”
Marist College has two internet connections, one primary and one backup, and it’s also a member of Internet2. During outages, the college implements speed restrictions for traffic going over the different secondary routes. For security purposes, Marist College also monitors its network traffic.
“We worry about natural disasters, of course,” Thirsk said. “What would we do if there is a flood, or an earthquake or tornado, or things like that–and that’s just a [function] of good data-center management and organizational readiness.”
Marist College shares a data center in Syracuse, N.Y., called NYSERNet, with a number of other colleges and nonprofit organizations. It also has one main data center at the college and is building a secondary data center in a new technology building, Thirsk said. The college has three electrical grids on campus, so if one goes down, users can come up on another grid.
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