Report 2016-129 Recommendation 8 Responses

Report 2016-129: K-12 High Speed Network: Improved Budgeting, Greater Transparency, and Increased Oversight Are Needed to Ensure That the Network Is Providing Reliable Services at the Lowest Cost to the State (Release Date: May 2017)

Recommendation #8 To: Imperial County Office of Education

To help facilitate the review of circuit capacity needs, ICOE should maintain historical data for network traffic as long as technically feasible. It should also ensure that its monitoring software includes all network sites.

1-Year Agency Response

In the summer of 2017 ICOE changed settings on its Orion monitoring system to retain a minimum of five years' data. ICOE agrees that all circuits procured from vendors by CENIC on behalf of K12HSN and the state as well as the dark fiber connections serving node sites should be monitored. ICOE has worked with CENIC to secure access to the dark fiber connections which had previously been shielded from K12HSN monitoring. Currently all of the "lit" circuits and all of the dark fiber connections are included in the monitoring system in use by ICOE. The CENIC network operations center (NOC) notifies K12HSN staff via e-mail distribution lists when new circuits are put into service or decommissioned to ensure that K12HSN adds them to or removes them from the Orion monitoring system.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Fully Implemented

As noted in our evaluation of ICOE's 60-day and 6-month responses to this recommendation, ICOE has already taken steps to implement the portion of the recommendation related to data retention. In its 1-year response, ICOE confirmed that it has now successfully worked with CENIC to ensure monitoring access for all active circuits. ICOE also provided documentation of notifications CENIC provides to ICOE staff when a new circuit is activated or an existing circuit is decommissioned. In the former scenario, the notification also informs ICOE staff how to begin monitoring the newly active circuit.

6-Month Agency Response

ICOE agrees that all circuits procured from vendors by CENIC on behalf of K12HSN and the state should be monitored, there are technical barriers to gaining access to the connections over dark fiber. ICOE is working with CENIC to ensure that not just all of the "lit" circuits but also all dark fiber connections are included in the monitoring system in use by ICOE.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Partially Implemented

As noted in our evaluation of ICOE's 60-day response to this recommendation, ICOE has initiated a process to automatically retain network usage data for five years with its Orion monitoring software and will be archiving the data from the system in order to retain it past five years. We will evaluate the outcome of ICOE's work with CENIC that is reported in ICOE's one-year response to determine whether that work results in processes to ensure network and outage monitoring for all active K12HSN circuits.

60-Day Agency Response

ICOE changed the settings in its monitoring system by June 15, 2017, so that Orion/Solarwinds is now retaining daily average utilization for five years (1,825 days). ICOE may, in the future, substitute a different monitoring system for its existing system, nevertheless, steps will be taken to retain historical data for purposes of future use in the activity of evaluating growth trends. Further, the requirements created in recent K12HSN-related budget bill language will be followed.

ICOE has implemented new practices and notice requests from CENIC in order to ensure that all K-12 aggregation node sites are subject to monitoring in the K12HSN system. In addition, for any non-standard connections such as those resulting from a "local build" instead of a circuit purchased from a telecommunications provider, ICOE will work cooperatively with CENIC and the node site staff members to ensure that all program-funded connections are monitored.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Partially Implemented

ICOE has initiated a process to automatically retain network usage data for five years with its Orion monitoring software and will be archiving the data from the system in order to retain it past five years. ICOE has taken steps to help ensure CENIC notifies ICOE about newly active circuits so that those circuits can be included in Orion, but ICOE still needs to take further steps to ensure that all currently active circuits are monitored.

All Recommendations in 2016-129

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.