UIT Retrospective, 2025
By Milena JeremicFebruary 12, 2026
As we step into the new year, UIT is taking a moment to celebrate the achievements and milestones our teams reached in the past year. 2025 was filled with amazing accomplishments, all thanks to our UIT teams, who work hard to provide the York community with incredible IT resources daily. Our CIO, Brad Strom, has a couple of words to share with 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's a privilege to be a part of such a 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 big year, with the launch of the Azure Virtual Desktop service in 2025. This launch made York the first Canadian University to do a cloud-native implementation.
Our IPA initiative also kicked off in 2025. The initiative is helping to revolutionize how data can be used to make informed decisions. By combining data from various sources and leveraging advanced tools like AI and machine learning, the initiative simplifies reporting, improves efficiency, and builds powerful models. UIT is always looking for ways to improve our technologies and processes, and this project speaks to the innovation and ambition of our teams. We look forward to seeing the continuation of the project in 2026!
Often, the biggest accomplishments in UIT aren’t heard about by the community; it is just the nature of our jobs. When things are going well, we fade into the background. This is why we wanted to take this opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our quieter achievements. We accomplished so much with our network modernization initiative, which provides the community with a faster, more secure, and more reliable network. 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 work doesn’t stop. We wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported us this year; your partnership means everything, and we will continue to work hard to provide you with the help and services you need.