The post Secure Research Environments Phase 1: How We Move Forward appeared first on Internet2.
]]>Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In an effort to help research and higher education (R&E) institutions navigate through cloud technologies for research, the Internet2 CLASS Program launched the Secure Research Environments series.
The series is split into three distinct phases that cover the different stages of institutional planning and execution. The first phase of the Secure Research Environments series focuses on institutional strategy and will conclude on March 31, 2026, with the “Stakeholder Identification & Governance Alignment Workshop”.
Catch Up on the Secure Research Environments Series
If you would like to review the recordings or slides from the Secure Research Environments series, please contact CLASS.
In the first phase of the series, our guest speakers helped attendees explore what research computing teams should consider when scoping secure research environments. Together, we addressed how a researcher-centered security model can accelerate (rather than impede) research, and where to take your institution from here.
Research Computing and the Path to Implementation
In a Feb. 17 webinar, guest speaker Dr. Jill Gemmill, associate vice president of Research Computing and Data at Clemson University, helped us think about the emerging research security landscape and its implications for research computing teams.
For many research computing professionals, secure research is a new territory. Jill provided a practical framework for thinking clearly about the “Who, What, Why, When, and How” of standing up a secure research environment.
Jill also laid out a leadership roadmap for getting this work off the ground:
- Establish Authority (secure executive sponsorship and define ownership)
- Audit the Process (assess your current compliance posture and identify gaps)
- Fund Sustainment (plan for ongoing operations, not just the initial buildout)
That last step is easy to overlook, but critical. Standing up a secure research environment is a commitment, not a one-time project.
Jill also flagged the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) timeline as something institutions need to take seriously now.
CMMC requires documented evidence that controls have been operating effectively over time. You can’t certify retroactively. Without certification, your institution won’t be eligible to bid on U.S. Department of Defence contracts that require it. Waiting is itself a risk.
Keeping the Researcher at the Center
The webinar sessions in the initial Strategy phase of the Secure Research Environments series concluded with a discussion about empowering researchers through risk reduction.
Will Drake, CISO and principal security analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, led a webinar on March 3 that showed that risk reduction is achieved by empowering researchers.
Researchers are often left with little to no support in translating cybersecurity regulations and requirements into something implementable.
The solution, according to Will, is to accelerate the research mission by reducing that burden. Provide researchers with the technical and support resources they need to conduct research securely, with security baked in and made as frictionless as possible.
Will shared Indiana University’s SecureMyResearch program as a model. Since launching in 2020, the program has handled over 1,100 cases, consulted on more than $500 million of funded research, and reached 90% of academic departments at Indiana University.
Will laid out two essential steps for building this kind of program.
First, you must build a portfolio of pre-secured technical solutions. Select a robust third-party security baseline, apply it broadly across your research computing solutions, and leverage inheritance. Understand your researchers’ use cases, secure your existing shared systems, architect solutions for common needs, and develop workflows for edge cases. Researchers will always find a solution; the question is whether the one they find is secure.
Second, provide cybersecurity consulting and support across the full research lifecycle, from pre-award planning and budgeting through contracting, institutional approvals, project execution, and closeout. Partner with the groups that already own each stage.
When you treat security as something you do for researchers rather than to them, adoption follows naturally.
Putting Strategy Into Practice
We encourage anyone working with institutional research security to participate in the upcoming “Stakeholder Identification and Governance Alignment Workshop” on March 31.
In this workshop, we will move from learning to practice. Working in small institutional teams, we’ll walk through realistic research scenarios, from straightforward regulated projects to messy edge cases like time-sensitive requests and budget crises mid-project, to identify the people who need to be at the table and stress-test whether our governance structures can hold up under real pressure.
The goal is to leave with a clearly defined core team, a full stakeholder map, and a framework for how governance of secure research environments fits within your existing institutional compliance structures.
Phase 1 of the Secure Research Environments series surfaced hard questions about who owns research security, how institutions organize around it, and whether current structures can hold up under real pressure.
The March 31 workshop is where we start answering them — and Phase 2 of the series is where we turn those answers into architecture. If your institution is navigating these challenges, now is the time to get involved.
Join Us for the Secure Research Environments Series Design Phase
Beginning April 7, we are kicking off the Design phase of the Secure Research Environments series. This second phase of the series will run from April to June.
We will shift from strategy to architecture. In the Design phase, we’ll dig into what secure research environments look like in technical terms, hear from peers who have done this work, and get hands-on with security controls.
Attendees will also learn directly from cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Kion, about their approaches to supporting SRE implementations.
Here is what is coming:
- April 7 – Patterns for Secure Research Enclaves Webinar: Common architectural approaches and design decisions
- April 21 – Real World SRE Implementations and Lessons Learned Webinar: Hear from peer institutions who have been through it
- May 5 – Security Controls Workshop: Move from interpretation to practical review
- May 12, May 26, June 2, and June 16 – Cloud Provider Deep Dives: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kion each present their approach
- June 23 – Mapping the Implementation Phase: A community discussion to set the stage for the Implementation Phase of the series
As a reminder, institutions that participate in all sessions within a phase receive one hour of personalized consulting (up to three hours across all three phases) with experienced community members to help launch your secure research initiative.
We still have a lot of ground to cover in the Secure Research Environments series. If you haven’t already, join us for upcoming webinars and workshops so you don’t miss everything that is ahead.
Need guidance for your secure research infrastructure design? Join Internet2 CLASS at one of our upcoming webinars and workshops in the Secure Research Environments series.
ICYMI
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]]>The post Secure Research Environments Phase 1: What We’re Up Against appeared first on Internet2.
]]>Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In early 2026, the Internet2 CLASS program launched the new Secure Research Environments series. The three-part series, comprising webinars and workshops, was built to help research and higher education (R&E) institutions navigate secure research and compliance in the cloud.
The informational webinars in the first phase of the Secure Research Environments series wrapped up on March 3. Phase 1 — which focused on institutional strategy — will conclude on March 31 with the “Stakeholder Identification & Governance Alignment Workshop”.
Catch Up on the Secure Research Environments Series
If you would like to review the recordings or slides from the Secure Research Environments series, please contact CLASS.
Over the course of the four webinars in Phase 1, our speakers and attendees have built a shared understanding of what it takes to stand up a secure research environment.
The picture that emerged from those webinars suggests that the solution to secure research is larger than any one team or technology.
This blog is the first of two posts that recap what we learned during the first phase of the Secure Research Environments series. In this blog, we will review lessons learned about institutional challenges and survey the compliance landscape.
The University Research Landscape Has Changed
The Secure Research Environments series got underway with guest speaker Mike Corn, an executive strategic consultant at Vantage Technology Consulting Group, who reviewed the secure research world we’re operating in right now.
Research cybersecurity isn’t a niche IT concern anymore; it is now geopolitical. Nation-state actors are targeting research institutions, and the regulatory landscape is catching up fast.
Between NSPM-33, the CHIPS and Science Act, and forthcoming NIST 8481 guidance, it is now clear that federal research agencies will require institutions to certify their cybersecurity programs. The ability to receive federal funding may be contingent on institutional acceptance of accountability for the cybersecurity practices of individual researchers.
Mike’s message during this session was direct: The “Not My Responsibility” era is over. Universities are now accountable operators of what is effectively regulated infrastructure. The operating model must change, and Mike encouraged everyone to get started as soon as possible.
Begin by identifying who owns research cybersecurity at your institution. If you don’t know the answer to that question, there is your starting point.
Research Cybersecurity is About People, Not Just Technology
In the second session of the series, we shifted our attention to the organizational and human side of secure research environments.
Dr. Bill Barnett, chief research computing officer at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, led the webinar and provided a welcome reminder that this work is fundamentally about working with people.
According to Bill, most institutions know how to work between pairs of organizational functions:
- Research Administration bridges the “Accomplish the Mission” and “Manage the Work” sides of the house.
- Research Compliance connects “Accomplish the Mission” with “Protect the Organization.”
- Sponsored Programs links “Manage the Work” and “Protect the Organization.”
But who sits in the middle when all three need to come together to address research cybersecurity? That is the gap.
Filling that gap requires clear governance, cross-organizational commitment, and a defined project scope — not just a directive handed to IT.
Bill walked us through what it looks like to get started the right way. You have to articulate the “Why,” organize the right people across a governance stack (from executive sponsors to risk managers), and frame the work through a project charter with a clear vision, a defined mission, and measurable goals.
Purpose and commitment lay the groundwork. Critical roles live across the entire institution. Governance and clarity of scope are essential first steps for institutions.
Compliance Goes Well Beyond IT
On Feb. 17, 2026, Mary Duarte Millsaps, the director of Research Compliance at North Carolina State University, led a webinar session to help us see just how much of the compliance picture lives outside the boundaries of a technical implementation. She grounded attendees in regulatory specifics, walking everyone through Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) rules, safeguarding requirements, and the full lifecycle from proposal identification through continuous monitoring to project closeout and data archiving.
Mary highlighted critical roles that many institutions have yet to define. An Affirming Official is a senior leader who certifies compliance under the False Claims Act, a significant source of personal and institutional exposure.
Meanwhile, an Empowered Official holds independent authority to stop research or export-controlled transactions, ensuring that security requirements aren’t subordinated to funding pressures or project timelines. These roles point directly back to the organizational challenges Bill raised in the second session of our series.
Mary also reminded us that many of the NIST SP 800-171 security control families have non-IT dimensions that require cross-functional coordination.
Who checks that users are authorized to be on a project? Who manages and tracks required training? Who reports an incident to the U.S. Department of Defense? These aren’t questions that IT can answer on its own. Getting the right people assigned to these responsibilities early is essential.
What is Next in the Secure Research Environments Series
The message from the first webinars in the Secure Research Environments series is that regulated research cybersecurity is real, urgent, and fundamentally organizational.
So, what does it actually look like to move a campus toward readiness?
We helped answer that question in the rest of Phase 1 of the Secure Research Environments series. Attendees learned what research computing teams should prioritize first and how one institution built a researcher-centered security program that accelerated (rather than impeded) research.
On March 31, we are running the “Stakeholder Identification & Governance Alignment Workshop” to help you put all of this information into practice at your own institution. Registration for the workshop is still open, though spaces are limited to the first 40 registrations.
Check back with Internet2 CLASS for more blogs about the Secure Research Environments series. If you haven’t already, join us for upcoming webinars and workshops so you don’t miss everything that is ahead.
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]]>The post Internet2 Community News Spotlight – March 2026 Edition appeared first on Internet2.
]]>- Harrisburg Joins National Initiative to Improve Student Success in Computing (Penn State)
- UC San Diego Students Learn HPC Skills via SDSC’s Expanse
- Open Source: Advancing Our Digital Commons (Campus Technology)
- Simulating the Life Cycle of a Cell with NCSA’s Delta (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Community News Recap — March 1-7
- Florida State University Celebrates Partnership with Amazon Web Services
- New catalog more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave detections made by LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observatories (MIT)
- Inside Mines’ Quantum Push: A New Degree Prepares Students to Shape What’s Next
- U.S. Department of Labor Defines 5 Key Areas of AI Literacy (Campus Technology)
Send feedback and share your institution’s stories for consideration to [email protected].
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]]>The post Notre Dame’s Adam Kronk to Keynote the 2026 Internet2 Community Exchange appeared first on Internet2.
]]>CHICAGO, March 10, 2026 – Internet2 announced today that Adam Kronk, director of research and external engagement at Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, will deliver the opening keynote address at the 2026 Internet2 Community Exchange (CommEX26), April 13-16 in Chicago.
AI, Digital Transformation, and Strategic Leadership
His keynote, “The DELTA Strategy: Navigating the Next Decade of Digital Transformation and AI,” will confront the defining pressures facing research and higher education (R&E) leaders: the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into teaching and learning, workforce disruption, federal funding uncertainty, and intensifying scrutiny around institutional ROI. The session is scheduled for April 14.
Drawing on a five-year initiative on human flourishing in the age of powerful AI, Kronk will share the DELTA framework — dignity, embodiment, love, transcendence, and agency — as an enduring lens for institutional decision-making. The framework provides the foundation needed to get it right, as IT leaders are being asked to innovate quickly and demonstrate instrumental value in a time of upheaval. Attendees will leave with strategic insights to lead AI integration in ways that strengthen academic integrity, workforce relevance, and institutional resilience.
“At this year’s Community Exchange, as AI accelerates change across research and higher education institutions, innovation must remain grounded in people and purpose,” said Mike Erickson, interim vice president for Community Engagement and Impact at Internet2. “Adam Kronk outlines a practical and hopeful path forward for advancing technology in ways that reflect and reinforce shared principles — and serve the common good.”
Kronk joins a lineup of CommEX26 speakers from Carnegie Mellon University, Kansas State University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of Maryland, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, alongside leaders from GÉANT, SURF, Great Plains Network, Louisiana Optical Network Infrastructure, REN-ISAC, ARIN, and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, as well as industry collaborators. Together, they bring diverse perspectives from across the global R&E community that resonate with leaders navigating rapid technological and fiscal change.
A Community-Driven Forum for Research and Education IT Leaders
CommEX26 convenes R&E IT leaders and decision-makers, including chief information officers, network directors, security professionals, cloud architects, research computing and data professionals, and regional and global network executives. As Internet2 marks 30 years of community-driven progress, this year’s gathering focuses on AI innovation, cybersecurity resilience, sustainable IT funding, and collaboration to shape the next decade of digital transformation.
Unlike traditional technology conferences, the Internet2 Community Exchange is a collaborative event created by and for the R&E community. The program features peer-led sessions and strategic forums designed to produce actionable strategies for institutions navigating complex technology, policy, and risk environments.
Registration is now open. Learn more about CommEX26 and explore the program.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Reporters interested in obtaining a press badge for Community Exchange should contact Amber Rasche at [email protected].
About Internet2
Internet2® is a nonprofit, member-driven advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 serves 336 U.S. universities, 58 government agencies, 46 regional and state education networks and through them supports more than 80,000 community anchor institutions, over 1,000 InCommon participants, 62 leading corporations working with our community, and 70 national research and education network operators that represent more than 100 countries.
Internet2 delivers a diverse portfolio of technology solutions that leverages, integrates, and amplifies the strengths of its members and helps support their educational, research, and community service missions. Internet2’s core infrastructure components include the nation’s largest and fastest research and education network that was built to deliver advanced, customized services that are accessed and secured by the community-developed trust and identity framework. For more information: https://internet2.edu
Media Contact:
Amber Rasche
Internet2 Communications
[email protected]
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]]>The post Beyond the Price Tag: NET+ Service Evaluations Saved R&E Institutions Almost 500 Staff Hours appeared first on Internet2.
]]>By Apryl Motley, CAE – Communications Consultant, Internet2
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
New research about the value of the Internet2 NET+ Service Evaluation Process is now available. According to an in-depth analysis conducted by a group of graduate students in the Kelley School of Business’s Graduate Program (GAP) Field Consulting program at Indiana University (IU) last year, an average of 500 staff hours per institution was saved from community-led cloud services evaluations.
“When institutions adopt a service directly, they must dedicate internal staff time, develop complex legal documentation, and run costly RFPs,” said one of the MBA students who was a part of the IU research group. “NET+’s service evaluation process preempts this resource drain.”
For those institutions who subscribe to NET+ services, “our analysis confirms that this rigorous, collaborative service evaluation process replaces redundant, high cost due-diligence across dozens of universities and research institutions with a single, expert evaluation,” the student continued.
The service evaluation process saves time, reduces risk, and accelerates adoption of technology. New York University’s Stratos Efstathiadis, who participated in the recent NET+ Portkey service evaluation process, described it as “a demonstration of collaboration and efficiency… The synergy among peer institutions ensures Portkey meets the diverse AI requirements of higher education.”
Because the 20+ services that make up the NET+ portfolio were fully vetted by their peers in research and higher education (R&E), the program’s nearly 600 subscribing institutions receive benefits beyond discounted pricing. They save time and money when determining which cloud services to procure and benefit from community support during adoption. Implementing new cloud services is valuable; saving staff time in the process is priceless.
Less Leg Work, More Modernization
There never seem to be enough hours in a day. This is especially true for IT teams at R&E institutions. In addition to ensuring day-to-day operations run smoothly, they are responsible for identifying and procuring new technology services for their campuses.
How efficient is their process for procuring and deploying new technology? According to the Higher Ed Innovation Index 2025, 49% of campuses are accelerating tech investments, but 44% cite implementation as their biggest challenge. Further, when surveyed, only 14% of higher ed leaders were confident in their speed between the planning, execution, and analysis cycles necessary for adoption of emerging technology.
NET+ service evaluations, many of which take place over three months, provide the adoption accelerator that R&E institutions need to deliver the cloud services their stakeholders want more confidently and efficiently. Guided by the NET+ team, their peers do the leg work, so they don’t have to.
A participant in the service evaluation for the NET+ Miro service, Joseph Vaughan, CIO and vice president for computing and information services at Harvey Mudd College, appreciated how thorough the process was. Vaughan said, “I found the experience reassuring – the level of scrutiny, thoughtfulness, and resources (the big institutions have specialists in all sorts of areas that we can only dream of) gave me even more confidence about signing on to a NET+ agreement.”
The IU research team’s work reflects his sentiment. Through data analysis, interviews, and benchmarking, the team concluded that the NET+ program delivers efficiency by consolidating complex legal and technical vetting across peer institutions, accelerating service adoption from months to potentially days.
Community Collaboration, Vetted Value
The service evaluation process not only accelerates R&E adoption of cloud services, it ensures that this community’s unique needs are met. Service evaluations function as a workforce multiplier that reduces total cost of adoption through collaborative evaluation, shared expertise, and risk reduction.
Rick Rhoades, manager, cloud services and Linux server, The Pennsylvania State University and sponsor of the NET+ Kion service, put it this way, “Internet2’s NET+ service evaluations really show the tremendous value that can be realized when we leverage the entire higher education community.”
“We [were] excited to be one of 12 institutions that participated and evaluated many key concerns from institutions today, like accessibility, security and compliance, and favorable contract terms,” Rhoades continued. “The relationships that are formed through this community-driven process lay the foundation for institutions to successfully meet their needs together, now and for years to come.”
The process reflects the NET+ commitment to solving community-identified needs with shared, scalable solutions in emerging technology areas.
Principles of the Process
The NET+ Service Evaluation Process is designed to ensure that candidate services meet the stringent technical, security, and operational requirements of Internet2 members. The Service Evaluation Process follows the established NET+ methodology to ensure thorough vetting of each service:
- Technical Assessment: Evaluation of architecture, security, and integration capabilities based on community user experiences
- Compliance: Assessment of security and accessibility through HECVAT and VPAT reviews, with commitments to relevant laws and standards like FERPA, HIPAA, and WCAG.
- Contract Negotiation: Development of higher education terms and pricing
- Launch: Comprehensive documentation for portfolio inclusion
A geographically diverse set of public and private institutions representing Internet2 higher education members and Internet2 affiliate members participate in service evaluations. This broad participation helps ensure that the solution meets the unique and varied needs of institutions across different regions and sizes, from large research universities to smaller private colleges. Services undergo a series of technical evaluations, pilot deployments, and community reviews, ensuring they are fully vetted before being made broadly available through the NET+ Program.
“Given the hidden costs and time constraints associated with solo procurement of cloud services, the NET+ Program’s collaborative service evaluation model serves as a catalyst for bringing the best services to R&E more quickly,” said Sean O’Brien, associate vice president, NET+, Internet2.
Support NET+ Service Evaluations
Every hour dedicated to NET+ service evaluations is an investment in the community’s successful adoption of emerging cloud technologies. The NET+ Program helps the community move intentionally, so R&E institutions can proceed more quickly and confidently in deploying cloud services.
To learn more about the IU team’s research or express interest in participating in NET+ service evaluations, please contact the NET+ team at [email protected].
About NET+
The Internet2 NET+ Program brings together the collective expertise, influence, and buying power of research and education institutions to thoughtfully accelerate cloud adoption by enabling programs and services that act as a workforce multiplier for the community we serve. Powered by a higher ed peer community, NET+ makes the cloud work better for research and education.
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]]>The post Enhancing Cloud Connectivity with Internet2’s Route Policy Feature appeared first on Internet2.
]]>Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Network operators in research and education face an ongoing challenge: maintaining granular control over routing decisions as cloud connectivity architectures grow increasingly more complex.
The new Route Policy feature in Internet2 Insight Console Virtual Networks helps address this challenge. It provides network operators with the tools they need to secure, optimize, and configure their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing infrastructure.
What is Virtual Networks Route Policy?
Route Policy allows network operators to define how BGP routes are handled. Think of it as a customizable filter and transformation engine sitting at the edge of your network, evaluating every route announcement and applying your organization’s networking logic before routes are accepted or advertised.
At its core, Route Policy uses a match-and-action model. You define conditions that routes must meet (the “match” criteria), then specify what should happen to routes that meet those conditions (the “action”).
This simple but flexible framework unlocks critical use cases that address real operational pain points: staying under provider route limits, blocking bad announcements before they spread, and ensuring BGP selects the paths you intend.
Use Case 1: Protecting BGP Peers from Max Prefix Limitations
Cloud providers impose strict limits on the number of routes they’ll accept over BGP sessions. Exceeding these thresholds can have immediate consequences.
Amazon Web Services, for example, limits BGP sessions on private virtual interfaces and transit virtual interfaces to 100 routes each for both IPv4 and IPv6. If you exceed this limit, AWS will place the BGP session in an idle state, effectively taking the connection down.
For organizations managing multicloud environments or large campus networks with numerous subnets, accidentally crossing this threshold is a real risk. Adding a new subnet or changing routing configuration could push you over the limit and cause an unexpected outage.
Route Policy provides prefix-limiting and filtering capabilities that act as a safeguard before routes reach your cloud provider. You can configure policies that only advertise specific, well-aggregated prefixes to each cloud provider while blocking more granular subnets, ensuring you stay well under their limits.
In multicloud scenarios, you might advertise different route sets to different providers based on their limits and your traffic engineering requirements. AWS might receive one set of aggregated routes, while Azure or Google Cloud receives another, each managed through distinct route policies.
Use Case 2: Improved Network Security and Route Leak Prevention
Route leaks — where networks accidentally advertise routes they shouldn’t — remain one of the most persistent threats to routing stability. A single misconfiguration can cause outages by attracting traffic that should flow elsewhere.
Route Policy acts as your first line of defense. By explicitly defining which routes each network will accept from peers and which routes you’ll advertise outbound, you create guardrails that prevent accidental route propagation.
For example, you might configure a policy that accepts only routes matching specific AS-path patterns from a particular peer, or one that prevents your internal prefixes from being advertised to certain connections.
This “allowlist” approach means that even if something goes wrong upstream or downstream, your carefully crafted policies keep problematic routes out of your routing table.
Use Case 3: Traffic Engineering with Attribute Modification
Not all paths through the network are created equal.
You might have multiple connections between cloud and campus, with some offering better performance, lower latency, or lower costs for certain types of traffic. Route Policy gives you the tools to influence path selection by modifying BGP attributes.
Through attribute modification, you can adjust metrics like local preference, AS path prepending, MED (Multi-Exit Discriminator), and BGP communities to steer traffic along your preferred paths. Perhaps you want to prefer one connection over another for traffic destined to a specific provider or campus, or you want a deterministic path and failover between connections. Route Policy lets you encode these traffic engineering decisions directly into your routing configuration, ensuring traffic flows according to your operational and business requirements rather than relying solely on BGP’s default best-path selection.
Getting Started
Internet2’s Route Policy feature is now available for Layer 3 connections using the Virtual Networks Cloud Router in Insight Console. The console interface provides an intuitive way to create and manage policies, with full documentation available to guide you through configuration options.
Whether you’re looking to improve your network security posture, implement traffic engineering, or protect your networks from route overload, Route Policy gives you the control and flexibility you need. As cloud connectivity continues to grow in complexity, tools like this become not just helpful — but essential.
If your institution uses Virtual Networks Cloud Router, now is the time to explore Route Policy, what it enables, and how you can use it to be most effective.
Ready to get started? Visit the Route Policy documentation for step-by-step guidance through all available configuration options. Then log in to Insight Console to configure your first policy today.
ICYMI
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]]>The post From Ghost Students to Federal Requirements: Internet2 Helps the Community With Identity Proofing As We Sail Towards 2027 appeared first on Internet2.
]]>Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Ask any chief information officer (CIO), and they’ll agree: if you can’t trust who’s logging into your institution’s systems, nothing else you secure really counts. And right now, that trust feels under more strain.
That’s why Internet2 and InCommon are bringing community-backed guidance, shared pathways, and hands-on support to help campuses strengthen identity proofing and identity assurance.
As fraud grows more frequent, research and education (R&E) is paying the price. From ghost students to sophisticated actors exploiting students’ inexperience at help desks, the problem has become both a headache and a significant financial burden. According to “Fighting Financial Aid Fraud in Higher Education,” a 2025 article in EDUCAUSE Review, fraud can cost institutions more than $100 million annually, with each incident averaging nearly $7,400.
Internet2’s fall 2025 identity proofing survey makes clear that of the fraud and security concerns occurring on college campuses, the three of utmost concern are federal research access, financial aid integrity, and credential issuance and recovery. Factor in the 2027 federal deadline to meet the new federal identity assurance requirements, and it makes for a busy 2026.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Education, and other federal agencies are increasingly requiring institutions to increase the rigor of their identity proofing processes to access key data and services. A recent example is NIH requiring researchers to have verified identities by January 2027 to continue access to Controlled Access Data Repositories (CADRs).
When asked about the importance of identity proofing in lieu of the new federal requirements, Ann West, senior director of Strategic Partnerships & Research at InCommon, says identity proofing is one of the most powerful strategies institutions have to mitigate fraud.
“But it’s not an IT problem,” West stated. “It’s a business problem that touches admissions, HR, the registrar, financial aid, and research administration all at once.”
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) was once the golden practice, but even it is no longer enough. Its effectiveness depends on the strength of the identity being authenticated. Attackers know this, so they target enrollment, onboarding, and account recovery, posing as incoming students to obtain a “real” credential in the first place.
“Strengthening identity and security is fundamentally an institutional process challenge, and that’s what makes it both complicated and consequential,” West said.
For many campuses, the hard part is not agreeing if identity proofing is needed. The truly hard part is figuring out where identity proofing actually happens across campuses, who owns those processes, where current security gaps lie, and turning loose practices into a robust approach that keeps faculty, staff, and student data safe.
“Identity fraud in higher education is no longer an edge case. It’s a systemic risk that costs institutions hard dollars, compromises institutional brand, and undermines the integrity of research,” said West.
Because it can seem like a major undertaking to implement identity proofing systems while juggling the day-to-day, Internet2 and InCommon are making it easier by providing resources and opportunities to meet you at any point of your identity proofing journey.
These resources will help you get aligned, get specific, and get moving by enabling you to:
- Build a stronger understanding of identity proofing through key terminology, frameworks, NIH guidance, and community-shared resources.
- Identify meaningful use cases on your campus and better understand the operational and financial implications of identity proofing.
- Take practical steps through hands-on workshops, assessments, and an 8-week accelerator focused on creating a roadmap for identity proofing readiness.
- Apply community-informed guidance to better support researchers, institutional systems, and long-term strategy.
“Acting now means campuses can build toward prevention rather than scrambling to meet a hard deadline while managing a breach or an audit,” West explained, speaking about this community-driven support offered through both InCommon and Internet2.
West’s point underscores the challenge facing higher education: this is not simply about checking a box on a federal requirement by 2027. It’s about building a stronger, more coordinated approach to identity proofing that protects institutional operations, research, and trust before pressure turns into crisis.
Get Ahead of 2027
With 2027 approaching, institutions don’t have time to start from scratch or work in isolation. Explore the resources, guidance, and community support available now to assess your readiness and start building a smarter path toward compliance.
FAQs
In case you missed the January 2026 IAM Online, “Making it Easier for Researchers: NIH’s use of InCommon for Controlled-Access Data,” here are three questions from our session to help shape your understanding of the NIH and federal compliance.
A: Yes. NIH’s federation model now includes the InCommon Federation as an approved identity provider, meaning researchers can use their home institution as long as it meets the stronger assurance requirements.
A: Yes. NIH has developed a compliance check tool that campuses can use to verify their identity provider’s signaling the required proofing, MFA, and attribute release.
A: Identity proofing is the process of verifying someone’s real-world identity (“Who are you really?”). Identity assurance is the confidence level resulting from that proofing. It tells relying parties how confident they are of that person’s identity. In other words, proofing is the work done to verify identities, and assurance is the score or level of confidence.
The post From Ghost Students to Federal Requirements: Internet2 Helps the Community With Identity Proofing As We Sail Towards 2027 appeared first on Internet2.
]]>The post Collective Voice, Tangible Change: How Internet2 NET+ Advocacy Shaped AWS Transit Gateway appeared first on Internet2.
]]>By Tim Manik, Cloud Solutions Architect, Internet2
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
The Bottom Line
Internet2 convened the higher education community, formalized their needs through the NET+ AWS Service Advisory Group, and advocated directly with AWS. That advocacy influenced Amazon Web Services to develop and release a product feature, Flexible Cost Allocation for AWS Transit Gateway, that benefits research institutions and higher education globally.
Here’s the story:
The Visibility Problem
For years, institutions running multi-account AWS environments faced a frustrating challenge: Transit Gateway costs couldn’t be allocated to the accounts that actually generated the traffic.
If you ran a hub-and-spoke network architecture using Transit Gateway, your central IT team was stuck absorbing all the data processing charges, and research computing workloads were on central IT’s bill, which made budgeting unpredictable and chargeback models nearly impossible.
But this wasn’t a singular complaint. It was a consistent frustration across the higher ed community, and Internet2 NET+ was intent on making sure it didn’t remain one, raising the concern to AWS.
Gerard Shockley, director of IT at Boston University, has been working with Transit Gateway since 2018 and has been advocating for better cost visibility for almost as long.
“When Transit Gateway came out, I asked for two things: to make it free for higher education, and give us observable metrics across attachments,” Shockley recalled. Free wasn’t on the table, but AWS began considering ways to improve visibility into Transit Gateway usage.
Shockley’s individual advocacy for change was not having the desired impact.
Making the Case, Together
Shockley wasn’t alone. Starting in 2021, institutions like Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, the University of Colorado, and the University of Utah raised this issue through Internet2 NET+ AWS, a community of AWS and Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) subscribers who meet bi-weekly to discuss shared learning and challenges.
The group’s request was consistent: give us the ability to attribute Transit Gateway costs to the accounts using the service, not just to the organization that owns the service.
AWS listened. In November 2025, they released Flexible Cost Allocation for Transit Gateway, allowing administrators to direct network traffic costs to the source or destination account when appropriate. The feature supports granular configuration down to individual flow levels, enabling precise, consumption-based chargeback models.
The Outcome of Community Influence
Chris Manly, program manager of Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services at Internet2, has seen the budget reality behind these challenges firsthand, pointing out stark differences between higher ed and corporate environments while highlighting the benefits of a service provider that listens.
“It’s often a frustrating reality in higher ed that budgeting and financial frameworks preclude the best technical architecture,” Manly said. “Flexible cost allocation allows schools to use the best technical approach without needing to compromise due to budget constraints.”
Unlike commercial environments where centralized infrastructure costs often come from a single budget, In higher ed –especially for externally funded research – costs need to flow back to the department or grant that generated them. When you can’t do that, you’re left choosing between good architecture and workable finances.
Transit Gateway cost allocation removes that tradeoff.
As Kevin Murakoshi, principal solutions architect at AWS and lead technical resource for the NET+AWS community, points out, “A whole feature was released because of the Internet2 community advocacy,”. It came from years of sustained conversation between AWS and the higher ed community through the NET+ AWS program during which institutions articulated the same need and documented the demand.
As an ongoing effort to refine the flexible cost allocation feature, the team at Boston University is currently evaluating it and will provide useful feedback to the AWS service team. Shockley notes that being part of the NET+ AWS community and working with AWS has been a seamless experience and that seeing the community’s feedback turn into real product improvements makes the effort worthwhile.
The success of this feature launch is a testament to the power of the NET+ program. By bringing together institutional experts and vendor partners like AWS, the community ensures that cloud services are optimized for the unique needs of research and education.
Join the community that turns feedback into features and institutional change.
Your institution’s challenges shouldn’t be a casual sigh or another “just the way it is.” Add your voice. Shape the tools your institution depends on.. For CICP subscribers, this is a clear example of participation turning into influence.
Already a subscriber?
Keep track of the topics we are exploring by checking the CICP Calendar. Want to join the community? Explore the NET+ Cloud Infrastructure Community Program or reach out to [email protected] with any questions or suggestions.
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Summary
- 22 Leaders Join InCommon Steering and Advisory Committees
- In the Media: Internet2’s Kevin Morooney Puts Identity Front and Center in 2026 Cybersecurity Predictions
- 2025 Advance CAMP Series: How IAM Teams are Adapting Practices to Address Operational Pressures
22 Leaders Join InCommon Steering and Advisory Committees
InCommon has appointed 22 leaders from across the research and education community to join the InCommon Steering and Advisory Committees in 2026.
These appointments strengthen the community-led governance that enables secure collaboration across thousands of institutions worldwide.
In the Media: Internet2’s Kevin Morooney Puts Identity Front and Center in 2026 Cybersecurity Predictions
In Campus Technology’s 2026 Cybersecurity Trends to Watch in Higher Education, Kevin Morooney, vice president of trust and identity and NET+ cloud programs at Internet2, shares his perspective on OpenID Federation’s potential as a next-generation trust framework for research and education (R&E).
“Over the last few decades, identity and access management trust federations have enabled students, faculty, researchers, and staff on college and university campuses to access a wide range of online services and resources using a single set of credentials issued by their home institution,” Morooney said.
2025 Advance CAMP Series: How IAM Teams are Adapting Practices to Address Operational Pressures
InCommon is publishing a series of blogs to recap what we learned from the IAM community during Advance Camp at the 2025 Internet2 Technology Exchange.
The second blog of the series focuses on operational approaches, automation strategies, and emerging practices that emerged during ACAMP discussions. See how IAM teams are responding to challenges around scale, security, and sustainability.
The post InCommon Round-Up: 3 Things You May Have Missed in February appeared first on Internet2.
]]>The post International Networks at Indiana University and Internet2 Expand New York to London Connectivity appeared first on Internet2.
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The U.S. research and education (R&E) community now has access to significantly increased trans-Atlantic research capacity to support data-intensive science. The NSF-funded NEA3R project, led by International Networks at Indiana University in collaboration with Internet2, has expanded its capacity between New York and London from 100 to 400 Gbps.
This upgrade strengthens connectivity between U.S. R&E institutions and collaborators across the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond. For Internet2 members, this means greater scale, resilience, and support for global research.
The upgraded circuit connects the Internet2-operated Manhattan Landing (MAN LAN) global exchange point in New York with the GÉANT OPEN global exchange point in London. It also contributes to the Advanced North Atlantic (ANA) consortium, aligning international investments to advance R&E networking.
Read the full announcement on the Indiana University website: International Networks at IU and Internet2 Announce Upgrade to Trans-Atlantic Research Connectivity
“Working closely with all our international collaborators, this expansion of NEA3R contributes directly to a trans-Atlantic infrastructure that provides not just increased bandwidth, but a more sophisticated system design. This coordinated approach means better redundancy, more efficient use of resources, and ultimately more reliable connectivity for the research community when they need it most.”
– Chris Wilkinson, Senior Director of Network Infrastructure and Operations at Internet2 and Co-Principal Investigator of NEA3R
“The upgrade of the New York <> London path to 400Gbps reflects the strength of our partnership with Internet2 and our shared commitment to supporting U.S. research and education at global scale. Through NEA3R and the ANA, we are aligning infrastructure investments with the growing needs of the science and engineering community and ensuring that international connectivity continues to support discovery, collaboration, and innovation.”
– Edward Moynihan, Director of International Networks at Indiana University and Principal Investigator of NEA3R
ICYMI
- Internet2’s Chris Wilkinson Appointed to Global Network Advancement Group Leadership Team
- perfSONAR Celebrates 20 Years of Simplifying Global Research Collaboration Through Standardized Network Measurement and Testing
- Indiana University’s NEA3R Expands with Internet2, Boosting Global Research Connectivity
- CANARIE, ESnet, GÉANT, and Internet2 Unveil Highest Capacity Transoceanic Connectivity for Research and Education
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