I know this... I was just trying to make an analogy for others. (Poorly, it seems) It's the same IT structure that you'd have at any major company of the same

I know this... I was just trying to make an analogy for others. (Poorly, it seems) It's the same IT structure that you'd have at any major company of the same size. And even at that scale you have good IT departments and bad ones. However, it can be rare for the University IT systems and research systems to share too much infrastructure, aside from maybe a building with common networking and power. For one thing, University IT typically supports Windows desktops and servers while research systems are by and large Linux/Unix based. They also have different security requirements. Research usually doesn't deal with PHI, and so doesn't have the same backup security concerns that IT does. In the specific case of UCSF, they already made the decision to offsite all of their business systems (I think it was because of local power costs, seismic concerns, and lack of a modern datacenter). But they still maintain some research computing onsite, but it is not centralized.