In March, Lab Director Charles Shank directed LBNL’s Chief Information Officer Sandy Merola to reduce the number of email servers at Berkeley Lab from 290 to 25 or fewer. The reason? To improve efficiency by reducing redundancies in cost and effort, and to limit the Lab’s cyber security exposure.

ITSD contacted the owners of all 290 of the servers (many of which were enabled, but were not being used as email servers) and required them to justify their continued use as email servers. As a result, on May 17, only 19 of those servers were certified to process email, and the status of another three is being reviewed. Additionally, 67 servers have been configured as email repositories, and two others are in the process of being converted to repositories.