Do It Once, Do It Well, Serve Many: Internet2 NET+
A Q&A with Sean O'Brien and Kevin Morooney
As we watch Internet2 in its 25th year, one of the most impressive things we see is its ongoing emphasis on community. Internet2 started with community involvement, and that involvement is strong, 25 years later.
Internet2 serves the higher education community with many important programs. NET+ is one we know well. Here, CT asks Internet2 NET+ leadership for some reflections and an update as NET+ reaches its own 10-year anniversary.
"NET+ leverages the scale of the Internet2 membership to do this work: to do it once, do it well, and serve many. That's really the secret sauce." —Sean O'Brien
Mary Grush: Internet2 NET+ is an established program, well-known to higher education technology leaders. But let's take a look at the basics, for a minute… When was NET+ established, and what were the objectives?
Sean O'Brien: In the 25-year context of Internet2, NET+ is now 10 years old… so it's at an anniversary as well, launched in 2011 as an initiative within Internet2.
Like most things Internet2, a group of technology leaders — CIOs and others — saw the wave of cloud services coming.
If you think back to that 2011 time frame, the cloud was not as pervasive as it is today — it was really in its infancy. But those community leaders saw that there were going to be certain challenges they would have with the cloud, and it would make sense to come together to remove those barriers to adoption.
That's part of the ethos of Internet2: removing technical barriers to adoption for our members — ultimately helping them enable their research and education missions.
That's part of the ethos of Internet2: removing technical barriers to adoption for our members — ultimately helping them enable their research and education missions.
Grush: What was the nature of the barriers you were removing, in the case of the program that became known as NET+ ?
O'Brien: This work was in the cloud area specifically, moving from on-premises to the cloud. There were three areas IT needed to address from the very beginning:
One was network connectivity. When the server is not in your own data center and workloads are not being done on your campus, can you still have a high-capacity, low-latency connection to service providers? The second was identity and access management. No one wants to be setting up different login credentials for each cloud service they're using — particularly now, when you have campuses that are using potentially hundreds of cloud services. And the third piece was contracting. Higher education was at that time, 10 years ago, very familiar with software licensing, but cloud licensing looked very different. After all, you were giving another entity access to your data — the university's data.
So if you look now at Internet2, being the home of the NET+ program, we have the network expertise — as the name implies in the research and education network; we have the identity and access management piece, with InCommon and the trust and identity federation; and we created the contract management expertise in the course of doing that work.
And NET+ soon grew into a fourth area by doing vendor management, and doing it at scale. We work with some of the largest corporations in the world, and that's helpful to both higher education and to the vendors who are hearing from higher education with one magnified voice through NET+ — advocating for features, advocating for functionality, and talking about compliance.
So the NET+ program was built on supporting our members within those four broad areas. NET+ leverages the scale of the Internet2 membership to do this work: to do it once, do it well, and serve many. That's really the secret sauce.
Grush: Speaking of scale, what is the size and scope of NET+ now?
O'Brien: We have 381 individual institutions that have at least one NET+ service and have adopted the contract. A little over a quarter of those, 102 institutions, have three or more services. There are 22 cloud services in the NET+ portfolio today. We try to keep the portfolio in that sweet spot of maybe 20-25 services to ensure we can have deep strategic engagement with those service providers.
One of the things I'm most proud of is that we've had more than a hundred institutions, 117 to be precise, contribute to at least one service evaluation.
Grush: How does the service evaluation work?
O'Brien: That's how a service gets into the NET+ portfolio. We convene a group of universities that have a similar problem, or a similar need, and work with them on evaluating different characteristics of a service: features, functionalities, identity and access management, accessibility, security… Then ultimately those universities help us negotiate the contract.
Having a breadth of different higher education institutions contribute to that is really exciting, and it's the core value of the NET+ program.
Grush: Is that the same as the peer-driven validation process for NET+?
O'Brien: Yes, but we've moved from the word "validation" to the word "evaluation." Because when you look at the size of some of these services, you really can't, on a national scale, turn over every rock. So we've changed the terminology a little, but that is the same peer-driven process. Reframing it as an evaluation seems like a tiny tweak, but just like your job as an editor, Mary, you want to be really clear with people about what you are doing.
Grush: Can you tell me more about the peer evaluation process?
O'Brien: As we've said, it's essentially the process we use to include a service in the NET+ portfolio. When we add a service into the NET+ portfolio, it's usually for one of two reasons: It may be that there's a new area of technology emerging where there's not an incumbent vendor serving higher education, and we want to work together to identify a vendor that can really meet the needs of higher education in that new area. Or, there may be a challenge with an incumbent vendor or set of vendors, where we either want to work with them to solve the challenge at the community scale, or introduce a new vendor into the higher education ecosystem that may do a better job of meeting the community's needs.
Once a need is identified, we'll convene, at a minimum, five Internet2 higher education members, to do the service evaluation. It's a deep evaluation of these services, and we have the vendors share a lot as part of this process. The advantage for vendors is that they are responding to that service evaluation once, for a group of institutions, in a structured, common way.
The advantage for vendors is that they are responding to that service evaluation once, for a group of institutions, in a structured, common way.
Grush: What are the things you look at in the service evaluation process?
O'Brien: We look at the features, the functionality, and whether the service meets the challenges or opportunities that research institutions have in higher education. We look at integration questions, such as whether the service can meet the institutions' identity and access management needs. We look at security and accessibility. Then, at the center of the whole process is the contract.
When you are adopting a cloud service, the service is really only as good as the contract. Your enforcement mechanism and your control are really derived from the contract. So we bring procurement officers, vendor management staff, and attorneys, from various higher education institutions together and have them negotiate a contract that most institutions would need. That becomes the NET+ agreement that ultimately governs our relationships. NET+ members can adopt that contract, for particular services, if they choose.
Grush: Kevin, you were working at Penn State when NET+ began. In fact, PSU was one of the founding institutions. Could you tell the NET+ story from your point of view? What was it like early on?
Kevin Morooney: Sure. I think I have a somewhat unique perspective. I've been working at Internet2 for five years now. Before that, when the idea of NET+ was germinating, even before 2011, I was an Internet2 member. And Penn State had been a very active member of Internet2, right from its beginnings 25 years ago.
There was an important meeting we had in the 2009 timeframe, when it was pretty clear, to a critical mass of member CIOs, that this "cloud thing" — I'm not sure we were even using the word "cloud" much back then — was starting to happen to us.
We started having conversations among ourselves: Was there an opportunity here, to work together and do things together that we couldn't do alone?
We started having conversations among ourselves: Was there an opportunity here, to work together and do things together that we couldn't do alone?
That, of course, was the fundamental value proposition of Internet2 since its founding. At the inception of NET+ we were asking whether there was something we could do together, with what some of us thought to be an inevitable move to the cloud.
How could we do this together, in a way that we couldn't do alone; to seize opportunities while abating various risks that we didn't yet understand?
How could we do this together, in a way that we couldn't do alone; to seize opportunities while abating various risks that we didn't yet understand?
Grush: What did you need to do to capture some momentum and make it happen?
Morooney: We asked ourselves, who among us could commit some resources outside of the other engagements that we had with Internet2? We started a dialogue — with that commitment amongst about 20 institutions — with the Internet2 leadership. And within about two years the activity was formalized: We called it NET+.
We were not in the cloud at the time, but we all sensed that we were going to have to move to the cloud. So how were we going to do that together, in ways that benefit us all?
Then, in time, some institutions had moved to the cloud, and they wanted to figure out how to live well in the cloud. How do we do this well? There were leadership-class institutions that had that "all-in" mentality. They wanted to optimize living in the cloud. They wanted to thrive in the cloud.
Of course, not everybody made the leap initially. There were a few who boldly stepped into the cloud. There were those who resisted it. And there were, as there always are within an adoption curve, that middle group: those who were testing the waters but hadn't quite gone "all-in."
And even now, we still have organizations that have a foot in both worlds, seeking to optimize life in the cloud in some cases and still trying to mobilize and figure out how to get there in others. So, from an Internet2 NET+ perspective, the scope of our work has increased: We want to serve all of these different types of cohorts.
Grush: Looking at the 10 years of NET+, and in terms of serving a community made up of institutions of those different types, what makes you successful in serving those different perspectives?
Morooney: We are using a very old skill, one that's existed in higher education even before Internet2, of learning from one another. It's just part of the ethos of working in a non-profit, especially higher education.
We are using a very old skill, one that's existed in higher education even before Internet2, of learning from one another.
Internet2 has become an engine for enabling that peer learning. Internet2 NET+ has successfully built out that capability: the environment that puts our members and our subscribers in a position to learn from each other.
In the context of Internet2, peer learning is a scaling factor, a force multiplier for helping people understand how to build their cloud roadmap.
In the context of Internet2, peer learning is a scaling factor, a force multiplier for helping people understand how to build their cloud roadmap.
At the same time, NET+ is engaged with the leadership-class institutions in imagining where to go next.
Grush: So NET+ facilitates work that institutions largely think through both on their own and with their peers?
Morooney: At Internet2 we don't have to do the work as much as we have to facilitate it. Facilitation requires energy and nuance and understanding, but it's a very different workload than doing it. So, one of the modalities that Internet2 NET+ has gotten really good at as we've matured over these past 10 years, is creating that context for peer learning. At the same time, we're engaged with the leadership-class institutions to figure out what they need next, in terms of optimizing in the cloud.
We are at our best, in balance, when the leadership-class members and our leadership-class subscribers are working with us as peers to figure out the next grand challenge in terms of optimizing workloads and improving various risk profiles associated with the cloud.
Grush: NET+ has certainly matured over its 10 years. Do you have any milestones that you could point to that have been reached?
O'Brien: Yes, of course. I'd especially mention three milestones reached over the past year and a half to two years that the NET+ community is excited about, and that are really important for us.
First, we made some changes for our governance or community advisory structure. We added two new standing committees: the BPLAC (Business, Procurement and Legal Advisory Committee); and CSTAAC (Cloud Services Technology Architecture Advisory Committee).
We created these two groups as we were thinking about how NET+ has evolved, serving two very different constituencies that have to work together in order for cloud adoption and realization to be successful. One is the business side of the university — procurement, vendor management, legal, and the business office, as represented by BPLAC. And the other includes the technologists who are making the decisions of what services to adopt, how to deploy them, how to integrate them with other services, and what the security or integration issues are that they particularly care about. And that is represented by CSTAAC.
So, we've been really purposeful about bringing those two groups together and asking, "What are your needs, what are your challenges, what opportunities do you have? How can a community organization like Internet2, through the NET+ program, support those?"
In some cases there are very clear ways we can do that. In other cases, we may think about involving another organization, or maybe there's another community group that does that better…
Grush: It must be very exciting, when you are tasked with bringing these groups together.
O'Brien: It's been a really gratifying, collaborative process, bringing these stakeholder groups together to engage them at a strategic level.
It's been a really gratifying, collaborative process, bringing these stakeholder groups together to engage them at a strategic level.
Grush: What's the second milestone?
O'Brien: The second milestone I'd like to call out is the Cloud Scorecard.
We convened a working group back in the 2018/2019 timeframe, when we saw the explosive growth of cloud services on campuses continuing. This was when we made the choice, in consultation with our NET+ community — instead of scaling our portfolio in step with that explosive growth — to maintain a relatively smaller portfolio of services, and really have a strategic engagement, in great depth, with each of those services.
But we know the community had a need to assess cloud services against all the different standards that research and education institutions care about.
So the working group we convened was tasked to answer the question "How do we do that in a scalable manner?"
That community group created what we now call the "Cloud Scorecard" — this is the well-known cloud scorecard questionnaire.
Taking the lessons we learned from NET+ and the standards we applied to NET+, together we initiated a questionnaire that vendors could fill out in order to test how well they meet those standards. We released a final report in 2020 and the questionnaire itself in early 2021.
Grush: Are the questionnaire responses and scores stored in a way that NET+ members can access them?
O'Brien: We're currently building an online directory to store those vendor scorecards. So this was a big milestone. The community developed the specs, the recommendations, and now we are in the execution part of that milestone.
Grush: And what is the third milestone you'd like to mention? I don't see how you will top that last one.
O'Brien: It's the launch of the NET+ Google Workspace for Education service.
There has been a disruption in the content collaboration space: Vendors are moving away, en masse, from free unlimited online storage. That era is closing. Google recently made its decision to move away from free, unlimited storage as well.
NET+ was able to react quickly and bring in a group of university CIOs and those who administer Google services in the higher education space to do a really in-depth negotiation with Google, to arrive at a business model under the NET+ Google Workspace for Education program. It gives both Google and the universities a predictable and multi-year glide path, to move from unlimited storage to storage limits that universities will have to enforce.
That is one of the best and strongest examples of a challenge that is going to affect all of higher education.
The NET+ community came together and solved this problem once, at scale, versus each university trying to negotiate their own individual deal with Google.
So those are the three milestones I'd pick that show what we've accomplished together and inform where we're going in the future, especially in view of the changing arch of the adoption of cloud services.
Contracts are great, but the greater value is what the community wants to create for itself — value that goes beyond the contract; working together on the higher order things.
Grush: Kevin, would you choose the same NET+ milestones that Sean picked to talk about?
Morooney: Yes, but I'd like to add one very broad brush stroke to Sean's observations about milestones and the future of cloud adoption in higher education.
At first blush, when potential members and subscribers try to figure out NET+, they might focus on the contract — how much money they could save, and so on. Or, they may look at the terms and conditions around accessibility or security, or be concerned with privacy issues.
And we're really proud of the work that we do in all these areas, and more. But what Sean and I see as employees of Internet2, tilling the soil of NET+ if you will, is that contracts are great, but the greater value is what the community wants to create for itself — value that goes beyond the contract; working together on the higher order things.
[Editor's note: Sean O'Brien is the director of NET+ Cloud Services at Internet2. Kevin Morooney is the Internet2 vice president of trust and identity and NET+ programs.]