Page 17 - CT Innovation in Education, July 2021

that I can distribute this out to my help desk so they can better help the people on my campus to troubleshoot what’s going
on with their videoconferences.” It was such a fantastic and timely engagement and that just organically came together when somebody said they were using this new feature. It proved beneficial to so many campuses.
Many service providers were doing these types of webinars themselves, but when you hear something from your peers, it resonates differently than when you hear it from a service provider.
You also do service evaluation processes, where a group of people from different colleges and universities try out a new program and report back. Are there any evaluation projects going on right now?
Oh, sure. We’re working on a service evaluation where Rick Haugerud, chief information security officer for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is sponsoring the NET+ Palo Alto Networks service evaluation. And then
There are probably plenty of schools that still aren’t participating in NET+. How do they get engaged?
I think the one thing that every institution needs to understand is that Internet2 and NET+ exist only because
of the engagement of institutions. So, beyond simply contacting us to get involved with a NET+ service offering, I would encourage institutions to get involved in working groups and advisory boards. That is where needs are heard and program direction is voiced.
Campuses are very large places, obviously, and they are very distributed. And so, I may be talking to one person in one part of IT who may not share information about NET+ internally. We as an organization are trying to take the time necessary to help campuses understand how to engage with the entire campus community. It may be a discussion to figure out interest — zero trust or multifactor authentication or remote access — and then to have that discussion: “Here’s a community group or something you might be interested in,” or “We have a service advisory board that’s looking for new campuses to be involved.”
I think the one thing that every institution needs to understand is that Internet2 and NET+ exist only because of the engagement of institutions. So, beyond simply contacting us to get involved with a NET+ service offering, I would encourage institutions to get involved in working groups and advisory boards. That is where needs are heard and program direction is voiced.
But generally, we’ll have an announcement, publish supporting communications via blog posts and e-mails, and keep the community informed. For example, the campuses on the service evaluation for the NET+ Palo Alto Networks program were absolutely critical. Without them, we couldn’t do this. And without them being involved, the NET+ program wouldn’t exist.
I’ve worked in higher education my whole career. It’s invigorating to work with peers across the community to solve problems that scale for most, if not every institution, and to solve challenges such as, how do you best deploy multifactor authentication? Or, how do you best monitor your authentication logs with a security event management or centralized logging service like Splunk, so that you can solve immediate challenges or problems for the campuses?
That’s really rewarding on a personal level. Helping your peers solve problems and collectively come up with solutions is a great thing, and we are here to support the research and higher education community to accomplish that.
we’ve got three additional services that are very close to completion, which are outside of the security portfolio. There’s a service evaluation for Google Workspace
for Education that has a huge security advantage for campuses. Another is signNow/airSlate. And the third
is CloudCheckr, a tool for managing infrastructure as a service for cost management and configuration settings.
Once we’ve completed the service evaluation phase, we’ll work on building communities around those services, similar to the other NET+ services, and ask the community what hot topics they are seeing on their campuses. Then we’ll try to find service providers that have solved those problems for one campus and could for others.
Sometimes, service providers will approach us. They’ll say they’ve had a number of campuses ask them to work with the NET+ program on a service evaluation so that they can better meet the needs of institutions across higher education.
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