OOPS! They Did IT Again! How to Better Manage the Relationship with IT Departments and Avoid Conflict

Abstract

The William Osler Hospital System (Osler) is a mid-sized hospital system in Brampton, Ontario which has three sites and roughly 5,000 FTEs. The Health Sciences Library is a team of three covering all three sites and quite representative of the average hospital and health library in Canada. As a small library it relies completely on the hospital’s Information Technology (IT) department to ensure there is the right support to run its library systems and e-resources effectively. Although the relationship is good whenever there is a libraryspecific technical issue, there is less thought given to the library’s unique needs when there are institutional changes or considerations to the hospitals overall IT infrastructure. This was the case in the fall of 2019 when Osler Hospital was beginning a transition to a cloud security product called Zscaler. In simplified terms, Zscaler provides institutions using cloud security with a range of shared Internet Protocol (IP) addresses which are used at random. The purpose of this is to increase security of the network, a need that has become more important as technology becomes more expansive. It is also fast becoming a best practice. As a result, the use of an authentication protocol like Zscaler makes complete sense from the perspective of the IT Department. In fact, with electronic resources becoming even more prevalent as libraries move to a virtual existence in the post-COVID environment, effective IP authentication is also a key requirement to seamless access to these often expensive resources. With Zscaler, however, the IP sharing creates specific challenges when working with ebook and eresource subscriptions. The problem arises as publishers can’t control which institution is accessing their content as several institutions are actually sharing the same IP address