Networks and Infrastructure

What we do

Key to us becoming a truly digital first University is the network and infrastructure environment that all of our staff and students use to access resources.

The Infrastructure team is responsible for the architecture of core infrastructure services including the data centres, network, servers, storage and security, whether these are hosted on premise or externally. The team manages the University-wide wired network (which provides fast links between systems) and wireless service, and also maintains links to the national and international networks (Janet and the internet).

We operate state of the art technologies in our data centres, ensuring reliability and connectivity for everyone involved in the teaching, learning and administration processes. Failover protection is incorporated at every level, ensuring that hardware failures result in zero or minimal interruption to service delivery. A dedicated team of networking specialists maintains this environment.

Part of the team's remit is to provide identity and access management services to the University. Many of the University's IT systems and services require user accounts and passwords for secure facilitates interaction between different IT systems inside and outside the University.

The team works closely with other teams within Technical Services to understand what is needed to get software applications or code to run effectively, be it large scale computational power, storage, fast networks or virtual servers providing a range of operating environments. Infrastructure also maintain the technical roadmap for these elements to ensure that service requirements are met in a cost effective way.

The team also works closely with the User Experience Systems Development team in order to spot new and evolving technology and apply it in ways that will support the work of Technical Services as a whole and help us align with our Digital First stategy.