NGN: Shifting focus to enhance security features

Driven by ongoing global supply chain challenges, which significantly impacted Nextgen’s ability to meet scheduled deployment objectives for the remainder of the 2023 fiscal year, program leadership worked diligently to identify security and network opportunities that would continue to drive enhanced efficiency within our Yale community.

With nearly 75 Yale campus buildings successfully connected to the Next Generation Network, leadership is eager to shift some priority focus to activating long-awaited NGN security features!

While the team continues to prioritize the migration of our Yale capitol buildings, we have increased focus on leveraging NGN’s advanced security features within the migrated buildings, specifically on the medical campus. More information is forthcoming about activating new NGN security features for our medical campus communities in the coming weeks and months. Some features may require minimal self-driven support, such as device reboot or system authentication. However, where action steps or community response is needed, simplified step-by-step guidance will be provided and ITS support will be on standby.

Additionally, the NGN program team has begun an internal review of our project processes for an enhanced Yale community partnership and deployment experience. In the recent year alone, the project team has fundamentally shifted the way we align with our user community through sponsor enablement, a process establishing localized change partnerships. Our mission is to further refine our deployment and change management processes to be more community-centric, leadership-informed, audience-specific, and valuable to all. We hope to partner with Yale leadership for ongoing feedback, guidance, and direction in the evolution of our community engagement and delivery.

While we continuously look to evolve the Next Generation program and shift our priority focus to the activation of security-enabling features, our mission remains: provide a core network for the entire Yale community that drives enhanced security, reliability, and improved WiFi connectivity to meet the ever-growing needs of our student, researcher, faculty, and staff population.

Thank you for your continued partnership, support, and guidance in successfully reaching, preparing, and guiding the Yale community through the deployment journey to NGN.