UIT Retrospective, 2025
By Milena JeremicFebruary 12, 2026
Aswestepinto the new year,UITistakinga moment tocelebratethe achievements and milestones our teams reachedin the past year.2025 was filled with amazingaccomplishments,all thanks to ourUIT teams, who work hard to provide the York community with incredible IT resources daily.Our CIO, Brad Strom,has a couple of words to sharewith the community:
“I want to extend my deepest thanks to each member of UIT for their dedication, creativity, and resilience throughout the past year. The progress we made in 2025 not only positively impacted students, staff, and faculty but continued to strengthen and grow trust across our community.It'sa privilege to be a part of sucha great team!”
2025 was the year of AI, both at York and beyond. Our Innovation team has worked on some truly incredible initiatives and projects, not just keeping up with the continuously changing world of AI but actively shaping it and leading the way in higher education. They helped to launch 37 new websites, created and enabled the student absence reporting feature for students on eClass, created an AI course assistant on eClass, worked on process automation with GitHub Copilot, and created many AI ‘agent’ prototypes.
2025 was also a big year for the Cyber Security team. This year, they streamlined the vendor risk assessment process, reducing average review time from 8 months to 3 weeks; a 91% in time improvement! They also launched a university-wide cybersecurity training program and achieved a 67% completion in its first 7 months!
The Workgroup Technology Services team had a bigyear, with the launch of the Azure Virtual Desktop service in 2025. This launch madeYork the first Canadian Universityto do a cloud-native implementation.
ܰʴinitiative also kicked off in 2025.Theinitiativeis helping to revolutionize how data can be used to make informed decisions. By combining data from various sources andleveragingadvanced tools like AI and machine learning, theinitiativesimplifies reporting, improves efficiency, and builds powerful models.UIT is always looking for ways to improve our technologies and processes, and this project speaks tothe innovation and ambition of our teams.We look forwardtoseeingthe continuation of the project in2026!
Often,the biggestaccomplishmentsin UITaren’theardabout by thecommunity;it isjust the nature of ourjobs. When things are going well, we fade into the background.This is whywe wanted to takethis opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our quieter achievements.Weaccomplishedso much with ournetworkmodernizationinitiative,whichprovidesthe communitywithafaster, moresecure,and more reliablenetwork.UIT strives to ensure that our services work as efficiently as possible, so you can too.
Although 2025 was a year of success for UIT, the workdoesn’tstop.Wewanted to take a moment to thankeveryone who has supported us thisyear; your partnership means everything, and we will continue to work hard to provide you with the help and services you need.