PeopleSoft Imperfections or Head In the Clouds

PeopleSoft News Round-up is a monthly news overview that gives an insight into the latest PeopleSoft-related events as well as brief summaries and links to articles on PeopleSoft security.

Unwilling access to PeopleSoft records

Recently, we have touched the case where a former employee claimed it was possible to access confidential information generated by PeopleSoft due to auto-generated emails.

The employee created a site containing the examples of records but they were removed after the territorial government took legal action. Nonetheless, a new version of the website accusing the territorial government of negligence was made public.

The easiest way to explain the incident is to blame the system, and the Government of the Northwest Territories has used a popular ‘PeopleSoft is hard’ defence.

Data breaches are currently handled by the Office of the Chief Information Officer and the Department of Justice is working to strengthen its own privacy program.

Student changing grades with professor’s PS log in information

Students are becoming increasingly motivated to improve their grades but they do this illegally – by utilizing their computer hacking skills, as the history of HigherEd cyber attacks shows.

Texas Christian University has accused a student of stealing his professor’s credentials and signing into the PeopleSoft system to change his grade in three different classes. The student used keyboard devices to “log keystrokes and illegally obtain password information on computers”. One of the professors emailed his colleagues warning them about the breach and to explore the grade book.

The suspected student refused to cooperate with police and denied all involvement in the case. Texas Christian University’s Registrar’s Office said that he is still enrolled as a student at the university.

Investing in Cloud Slowly but Surely

From time to time, the enterprise applications costs of Higher education organizations cannot respond to their expectations and needs. To achieve cost savings, institutions create a mix of private and public clouds.

Until recently, California State University ran its Oracle PeopleSoft ERP in a private, on-premises data center in Salt Lake City. The University of North Texas, for now, runs applications such as Salesforce and Canvas in the public cloud, while continuing to host its PeopleSoft ERP system, data analytics solutions, and other workloads in-house.

According to a 2018 survey by RightScale, almost every organization uses cloud computing, and more than half of them implement a hybrid strategy. Some organizations use a multi-cloud strategy.

All of the same drivers for going to the public cloud — things like scalability, flexibility and, to some extent, cost — those are the same drivers for hybrid cloud. But then, one reason people take a hybrid approach is that they often don’t want to give up control over certain workloads. And there may also be things that are just more cost-effective to run in your data center.

Betsy Tippens Reinitz, director of the enterprise IT program for EDUCAUSE