The Open University of Catalonia (UOC Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) is a benchmark in 100% online training, with a flexible, dynamic, and active educational model, its mayor distinctive feature. The UOC is an innovative university, connected through the web with the rest of the world’s universities and providing an online space for the sharing of knowledge between students, teachers, and professionals. With these characteristics, it is essential to have technological resources that facilitate being able to provide a quality, agile, flexible service that adapts easily to changes, to maintain leadership in online training.
In 2018 SATEC Won the tender for the UOC’s Technological Infrastructure Maintenance and Availability Service, with a period of four years. In respond to the needs, the service is structured in 4 technological areas, a coordination and management layer, a back-office, and a front-office, as well as expert advisory services for carrying out projects. The organization is designed to cover the required specialization needs, covering the different technological areas of the UOC Service Catalog, and provide the necessary solvency for the coordination of the hierarchical units, its internal organization and distribution of tasks, the report of activity and the management of relationships with the different stakeholders: suppliers, clients and users. Additionally, the service has been provided with specialized teams that allow the monitoring and / or execution of specific projects in the IT area: the project support team, specialists for expert technical advice and the Cloud Office.
A fundamental fact when designing the service was the transformation component requested, so that it could adapt in a very agile way to the new business requirements and the demands that an organization as dynamic and innovative as the UOC requires. The resulting model is enabling a response with the required efficiency, flexibility, quality, and reliability, all thanks to SATEC’s large experience in the service area and its ability to adapt to the needs of its clients.
In addition to being a pioneer in its educational model, The UOC is also a pioneer in the use of Information Technologies that facilitate it, one of the key aspects of its transformation strategy being this the transfer of local infrastructures to cloud infrastructures , having made a very strong commitment to the adoption of a public Cloud model and obtaining important benefits.
Benefits in adopting a Cloud model:
- Accessibility, essential in a 100% online work environment, where it must be guaranteed that all users can connect to any of the resources they want in any location.
- Efficient information management, for the sharing of knowledge with teachers, students, research groups, etc.
- Security, to protect the information while keeping its confidentiality, availability and integrity.
- Reduction of maintenance costs of the physical infrastructure.
- Flexibility and agility in response to business demands, in a competitive and demanding environment.
- Possibilities of adapting the computing capacity to the needs of each moment, using auto scaling.
The Public Cloud adoption strategy presents a challenge that goes beyond the IT team itself, since it implies a cultural change, a change in the way in which new projects are approached and, therefore, it is essential to have a structure capable of clearly establishing how to work in the different areas that affect transformation, creating what has been called the Cloud Office, whose role pivots between 4 areas of action:
- GOVERNMENT: area in charge of defining the policies, standards, procedures and management and control mechanisms that affect Security, Automation, Good Practices and Optimization, as well as establishing Compliance Audits and Security to carry out.
- OPERATION: although working in the Public Cloud avoids the need to manage the physical infrastructure, other key aspects that are part of the operation cannot be forgotten, such as Monitoring, Backup, or Incident Response.
- PROVISION: one of the great benefits of the Public Cloud is the enormous speed with which new services can be provisioned, but this speed implies that it is necessary to carry out Economic Scenario Analysis beforehand, as well as the Configuration of the Services itself.
- SUPPORT: mainly responsible for accompanying the Integration teams, developers, etc. but from where other functions are also carried out, such as the preparation of training, communication and dissemination materials, or dialogue with Cloud providers.
SATEC has highly qualified professionals who actively participate in the design and provision of new services, based on the standards and procedures established by the cloud office itself. In the same way, they take advantage of the UOC experience in the provision of new services to improve all aspects related to governance and operation.
If you want to know more about our services around the deployment, migration, governance, management and operation of Cloud environments, do not hesitate to contact us.