Researchers have been evolving. Finding ways to get creative, jump through hoops, and collaborate in siloed environments. They, and other operational groups, have a growing need to manage, review, and share code. When critical infrastructure is not provided by the organization to fit their specific use cases, groups will find their own homegrown solutions. These creative solutions typically reinforce siloes, risk exposing sensitive data, and are costly. By providing these groups with the critical infrastructure they need, an enterprise source code control program, code developed at UCSF can follow best practices, increase collaboration, and protect sensitive information.
For software development to evolve into DevOps, this same critical infrastructure is needed. UCSF has launched the GitHub Enterprise Program which provides teams with access to a secure on-premises GitHub instance and/or a Cloud instance, depending on their needs. For many groups, the cloud instance provides the ease of use and flexibility to help their team establish a DevOps workflow. Other groups that work with patient data, require a security and privacy compliant environment. Without access to a secure environment these teams may use public cloud-based source control which poses a security risk to UCSF or they may not use a source code management system at all.
Our program initially focused on a few pilot groups and since then has launched to all of UCSF. We currently have 433 users across 53 different organization on the secure on-premises instance and 60 users across 18 organizations on the cloud instance. Our future goals include working with our users to prioritize new feature requests and to support teams that may need more training than traditional software development groups.
By providing critical infrastructure across the spectrum, from on-premises to cloud, the GitHub Enterprise Program supports researchers and operational groups in following best practices, reduces the risk of exposing restricted information, creates new ways to share knowledge across UCSF, and improves code development and quality.