Western Carolina University Information Technology and UNC General Administration (UNC-GA) are working on a project to move the WCU Banner servers, databases and application environments to the UNC-GA hosted data centers.
The UNC-GA hosted data center will ensure a stable and secure infrastructure by providing hardware support, disaster recovery, backups and restores, installation, upgrades, maintenance, and problem resolution of Banner server operating systems, databases and core Banner application. While WCU is delegating to UNC-GA hosted services the tasks of implementing, maintaining and securing the Banner infrastructure, the responsibility and ownership for the Banner data remains with WCU.
Seven UNC campuses use the hosted services: UNC-School of the Arts, Fayetteville State University, North Carolina Central University, Elizabeth City State University, UNC-Asheville, Winston-Salem State University, and NC A&T. UNC-Pembroke is scheduled to move to the hosted environment in February, 2015.
The WCU scheduled implementation is the weekend of April 11 and 12. During this time, production Banner will not be available. On Sunday, April 12, technical and functional users will test the Banner application before releasing it to the public.
The Banner Hosting Project is a collaborative effort that involves people from many different WCU departments and from General Administration. It includes technical and functional teams such as Networking, Server Administration, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Help Desk, Registrar’s Office, Finance, and Human Resources. For more information, contact Laura Simons at llsimons@email.wcu.edu.