AARNet
AARNet
At its most recent meeting – held in Munich, Germany on July 15, 16, and 17, 2015- the Global Research and Education (R&E) Network CEO Forum continued a series of strategic discussions on current and future challenges facing the global R&E networking community.
In Munich, the Forum welcomed participation from the executive leader of SINET in Japan as a new entrant to the Forum, and from the newly appointed CEO of the UbuntuNet Alliance.
The meeting began with a review of Security in a R&E World with one of Europe’s renowned security experts, Prof. Klaus-Peter Kossakowski, CEO of DFN-CERT and professor at the University of Applied Science in Hamburg, Germany. The major aim of this session was to raise awareness of the challenges associated with securing R&E organizations and the R&E community while maintaining the open nature of the environment. Following the discussion, the CEOs agreed to prioritize and focus the work of the Forum’s Security Study Group to better coordinate efforts globally.
In a discussion on the future of the Forum, the CEOs defined five focus areas for NRENs, apart from high-performance data network services. These are:
Aiming to mutually learn and encourage global interoperability, the CEOs agreed to jointly develop a roadmap to stimulate and accelerate the global implementation and adoption of new services in these areas.
The CEOs thanked members of the Forum’s active working groups for their contributions and discussed the current challenges, progress, and output of many of the working groups, including:
Additionally, the CEOs discussed how various R&E networking organizations work with cloud providers and data centre owners within their regions, focusing on efforts in Canada (DAIR from CANARIE) and the UK (Jisc, and especially Janet Reach). The discussions lead to identifying potential future collaborative initiatives between R&E networking organizations in areas such as compute, storage, security, big data, collaboration, and workflow.
The CEOs also reviewed a proposal from the Global PR Network, a group of marketing and communications professionals from R&E networking organizations around the globe, to coordinate messaging on the value and role of R&E networks. The CEOs endorsed the proposal and agreed to embark on a two-year trial with an expected launch in Q4 of 2015.
The next face-to-face meeting of the CEO Forum is scheduled to take place in South America in Q1 2016.
The Global R&E Network CEO Forum consists of the Chief Executive Officers of AARNet (Australia), CANARIE (Canada), CERNET (China), CUDI (Mexico), GÉANT Association (Europe), DFN (Germany), Internet2 (USA), NORDUnet (European Nordics), REANNZ (New Zealand), RedCLARA (Latin America), RENATER (France), RNP (Brazil), SINET (Japan), SURFnet (The Netherlands), and the UbuntuNet Alliance (Southern and Eastern Africa).