The Whit accepts ’Letter to the Editor’ submissions every week from members of the community and university. The opinions expressed are those of the author, and not The Whit or its staff.

Dear Editor,

Information Resources & Technology is fully committed to providing the university with the tools, systems and data it needs to effectively support students, faculty and staff.

Unfortunately, one of those systems failed multiple times in the last two weeks during critical registration periods for students. We accept complete responsibility for these technical issues and offer our sincere apologies to anyone within the university who was affected by them.

We are working aggressively with our vendor to develop a long-term solution to help prevent similar problems in the future. We have also launched an investigation to determine exactly what caused the recent outages. We pledge to be fully transparent with the university as we move forward with that investigation.

An editorial published in The Whit on March 23 described this situation as part of a larger problem with the university’s network services. The registration issues are not related to problems students may be experiencing while trying to connect to the university’s network, but we wanted to take this opportunity to outline how we’re addressing concerns about network performance.

We have implemented several major infrastructure projects in recent years that have significantly improved the speed and reliability of the university’s network amid rapid growth and change. Additional improvements are on the way.

One of the most significant projects we are rolling out in order to strengthen the university’s network is the quadrupling of internet bandwidth. We took the first step toward that planned four-fold increase last year when the bandwidth was bumped up to five gigabits per second from three gigabits per second.

The bandwidth is scheduled to be raised to 12 gigabits per second by September, which will make the internet faster and more reliable on campus. That bandwidth will be delivered by two internet service providers to help keep the university’s network running if one service fails.

Providing students with a high-speed network connection is a top priority for us. In response to complaints about spotty network access in student housing, we performed a major upgrade of the wireless network infrastructure in five residence halls over winter break. Further upgrades are planned in additional residence halls next year.

We will continue to evaluate and implement upgrades and improvements in order to provide better, more effective service to the university. We look forward to working with students, faculty and staff as we roll out additional projects in the future.

Mira Lalovic-Hand, Senior Vice President and CIO

For questions/comments about this letter, email editor@thewhitonline.com or tweet @TheWhitOnline.