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Summary
Detailed information on the migration of Banner to SUNY ITEC (Information Technology Exchange Center) including the reasons for the change, what's happening, the migration's timeline, and our contingency plan.
Why are we moving Banner to ITEC?
Efficiency
Migrating Banner to ITEC will bring our installation in line with every other SUNY that runs Banner, making system-wide changes easier to implement. Once we are hosted with ITEC, GCC will no longer have to take extra steps to adapt to these changes. Experts at ITEC and SICAS will perform updates to our systems using lessons learned from their work at other SUNY colleges and universities. Banner will also become more accessible from outside the GCC primary network, no longer requiring users to make a VPN connection to access it.
Decreased Cost
Hosted Banner will allow us to utilize SICAS and ITEC Banner support which was not possible in our current configuration. By utilizing these at-cost SUNY-based services we will decrease the need for costly 3rd party support. Additionally hosting Banner at ITEC will decrease the college's liability and increase our ability to respond to cybersecurity incidents.
Security
As a system-wide service provider, ITEC is able to provide a highly secure and robust host for our Banner instance. ITEC's Tier III Certified state-of-the-art data centers, will provide us with not only increased security but also will help to improve banner uptime. Tier 3 data centers feature multiple paths for power and cooling, and redundant systems that allow the staff to work on the setup without taking it offline. This tier has an expected uptime of 99.982% per year.
What's Happening
Our instance of Banner will be moving from our servers in Batavia to off-site ITEC servers. We have been able to keep the majority of our customizations so GCC Banner users should notice very few changes. ITEC and SICAS will take over the responsibility for Database Administration services that were previously provided by Ellucian.
Migration Timeline
Friday July 18th
After the close of business we will shut down our current instance of Banner. ITEC and SICAS will complete the work to make our Production instance at ITEC live.
Saturday, July 19th
ITS will make the final changes needed to switch services that connect or otherwise integrate with our current Banner production instance in Batavia to the ITEC hosted production instance of Banner.
Sunday, July 20th
To ensure that systems will run properly at the start of business on Monday the 21st, select users will test the new instance and work with ITS, ITEC, and SICAS to make any needed changes.
Contingency Plan
In the event of a major issue that impacts critical business processes during the migration, we will revert to the version of Banner currently running at GCC. Our current backup date is set for the next weekend, July 25th.