Page 16 - CT Innovation in Education, July 2021

Innovation in Education | INTERNET2 – learn more at internet2.edu
Community-Powered Problem-Solving
Nick Lewis, program manager for security and identity at Internet2, describes how the community-driven Internet2 NET+ program helps higher ed institutions get fast, proven answers to their questions and vetted solutions for their cloud and security challenges.
Nick Lewis
Program Manager, Security and Identity, Internet2
What role does Internet2 see itself playing in supporting the improvement of your members’ security postures?
NICK LEWIS: We facilitate the community engaging
with each other to identify best practices. For example, let’s say there’s a particular challenge that a campus is trying to figure out. They may go into a community call, where campuses can ask their peers: How do you solve this problem? And then they can get immediate feedback. Or there are many ways institutions collaborate digitally, including e-mail lists, Slack channels and wikis, where they can engage with peers to identify best practices. That is all part of the NET+ program, where advisory boards and community events help to foster more optimal service offerings and benchmarking. And a program manager
like myself is engaged with and supports these types of discussions.
After a number of campuses have verbalized similar challenges, we’ll realize maybe there’s something there that we need to write up, to share broadly with the community, where they can look at a frequently asked questions repository and find the answers to their questions. And that’s even faster than going and asking their peers.
Internet2 also supports its members’ security postures through additional programs such as InCommon’s secure, privacy-preserving trust fabric that enables institutions to make appropriate decisions about the release of identity information and the control of access to protected online resources, as well as through community activities like MANRS and HECVAT, among others. Security influences everything we offer, from our research and education network to access to cloud services.
During the pandemic, were you convening meetings with people to find out what they were
experiencing and how you could serve them?
Yes, we’ve convened quite a few virtual meetings and events. I’ll give you an example. One of the services that we offer is the NET+ Splunk program. In April 2020, Splunk released something called a remote work dashboard. One of the things this new dashboard did was help administrators monitor Zoom usage. Everybody was moving course instruction and meetings to videoconferencing. One of
the campuses on an e-mail list said, “Oh, we’re using this tool.” I followed up and said, “Do you want to speak on the next community call and share what you’ve learned?” We had something like 70 campuses on the call that we held in collaboration with the NET+ Zoom program. We’ve done
There are many ways institutions collaborate digitally, including e-mail lists, Slack channels and wikis, where they can engage with peers to identify best practices. That is all part of the NET+ program, where advisory boards and community events help to foster more optimal service offerings and benchmarking.
similar community calls on videoconferencing with services such as Microsoft Teams, among others.
Essentially, somebody had implemented a feature that Splunk had released two weeks prior and then they talked about it on a community call a week and a half later and answered many questions from their peers. I’ve heard from people who attended that call about how valuable that was and how it allowed them to figure out, “I really should be sending my Zoom logs into my Splunk implementation so
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