The CoC VPN appliance recently experienced a hardware failure that caused it to go offline (see http://support.cc.gatech.edu/alerts/coc-vpn-outage for details).  VPN provides secure access to sensitive data and services in the College.  Due to the downtime involved, the appliance will not be replaced.  Instead, the college is migrating to the campus VPN service.  Because of this, CoC VPN users must update their VPN clients according to the instructions at http://support.cc.gatech.edu/faq/how-do-i-obtain-coc-vpn-client.

As background, TSO was already working closely with OIT to migrate the College VPN to the campus VPN service and had completed much of the required work.  Due to the hardware failure, the VPN migration was accelerated because the downtime would have been greater to replace the CoC VPN appliance.  The benefits of migrating are twofold.  The first will be taking advantage of a service already provided by OIT.  Consistent with TSO strategy, we continually seek ways to utilize commodity services offered by the Institute so we can focus on specialized services for the College.  The second will be increased service uptime since OIT already has redundant VPN appliances.
 
TSO expects to have all necessary firewall rules updated by the end of today.  The TSO Help Desk is available to assist with any issues users may face in changing over their VPN settings.  We realize that the accelerated timetable and requisite changes will be an inconvenience to our users, and we appreciate your understanding during this transition.
 
If you have any feedback or concerns, feel free to contact Randy Carpenter or Uwanna Smith.