Post-Incident Analysis
Incident Summary
On Monday, February 23, 2015, the Graduation Application of the Georgia State Online Access to Student Records (GoSOLAR) system experienced a service interruption that resulted in students being unable to process their graduation application fees. The system was unavailable from 9:37 a.m. to 6:32 p.m. Because we recognize that interruptions of service impact campus processes, we are communicating this post-outage analysis of what occurred and the measures being taken to address the factors resulting in this incident.
Incident Cause
The Graduation Application accesses a third party vendor service, TouchNet uPay, for the collection of graduation application fees. The vendor renewed certificates used to verify the authenticity of this service without notifying the university in advance of the change, resulting in GoSOLAR's being unable to process fees until the Graduation Application could be configured to work with the new certificates.
Incident Response Measures
Information Systems & Technology has established notification protocols with TouchNet to ensure future certificate changes will be communicated in advance, so the Graduation Application's configuration can be adjusted without interruption of service.