Blog from December, 2020

Fall 2020 Service Updates

LabArchives releases Jupyter Notebooks integration

NET+ LabArchives reached 20 subscribers earlier this year. The Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) is being used successfully enterprise wide by tens of thousands of faculty and researchers in the Internet2 community. In the coming months, the NET+ LabArchives Service Advisory Board members will evaluate for inclusion in the NET+ program two other LabArchives products: LabArchives Scheduler, which has ~70,000 users worldwide, and LabArchives Inventory. Recently, LabArchives integrated with Jupyter Notebooks. The new integration with Jupyter Notebooks empowers users to capture data science, scientific computing, and machine learning workflows within LabArchives ELN for Research.

NET+ GCP offers the easiest path to use of the NIH STRIDES program

The National Institutes of Health STRIDES program offers deep discounts on cloud usage for NIH-funded research work. Enrolling an institution to take advantage of STRIDES with NET+ GCP only requires filling out an additional order form with your chosen NET+ GCP reseller. For more information on using NET+ GCP with STRIDES check out our blog post or email netplus@internet2.edu.

NET+ AWS campuses implement AWS Organizations and Control Tower

AWS Organizations and Control Tower are AWS features that help institutions to manage and govern their multi-account AWS environments.  The NET+ AWS Organizations and Control Tower working groups have helped map out strategies for campuses to successfully implement Control Tower in their AWS environments, and Internet2 published a post by Peter Traub outlining the implementation of Control Tower at the University of Virginia. If you are interested in participating in these working groups, please email netplus@internet2.edu

NET+ cloud services town halls are designed to keep subscribers up to date on the latest product updates, any NET+ program changes and to encourage and enable dialog amongst subscribing institutions for the various services. Here is a recap of some of the services that added or expanded town halls in 2020.

NET+ Zoom Community Town Halls

As universities were forced to move their campuses online, a lot of attention was focused on Zoom’s security, compliance and integrations with other systems. To help address the community concerns, the NET+ Zoom program coordinated the following community calls:

  • April 14 - Zoom Addresses Security & Privacy Concerns
  • June 16 - Community Roundtable to discuss upcoming Zoom releases that affect higher education
  • December 9 - Updates to Zoom’s LTI Pro App

For more information about the program or upcoming events, please contact netplus@internet2.edu.

NET+ DocuSign Program Launches Quarterly Subscriber Town Hall Series

On October 20th DocuSign gave a presentation of their roadmap, and representatives from University of California-Berkeley, University of Massachusetts, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and University of Texas-Austin shared details about the rollout of DocuSign on their campuses. Town Halls such as this are only open to subscribers. The next Town Hall will be taking place on January 19th. If you would like to ensure you are invited to the January event and any future events or to learn more about how to sign up for the NET+ DocuSign program, please contact netplus@internet2.edu

Quarterly Town Hall for NET+ ServiceNow Subscribers

Over the summer, the NET+ ServiceNow program began a new series on engaging NET+ subscribers in a town hall format. The inaugural event was based around an effort between the NET+ ServiceNow Service Advisory Board and ServiceNow product owners on designing a “Back to Campus” service to allow for institutions who were heading to an in-person instructional format to do so in a more safe environment. The town hall was then set up to draw feedback from program participants on work that was progressing in this toolset. For more information on this series, please contact netplus@internet2.edu.

NET+ AWS Town Hall 

The first of what will be regular Town Hall sessions for NET+ AWS subscribers was held on December 2. Topics discussed included virtual desktop services available from AWS (Workspaces and AppStream); an update from the working group looking at integrations between AWS SSO and Grouper; and, a discussion of managing connectivity to AWS, including use of the Internet2 Cloud Connect service. For more information on this series, please contact netplus@internet2.edu.

Quarterly NET+ Code42 Town Hall

The NET+ Code42 program held its quarterly all subscribers town hall on October 15. The focus of the town hall was on Code42's new product branding of Incydr and CrashPlan. Information on the town hall is available on the Code42 wiki.

Palo Alto Networks Service Evaluation Update

NET+ Palo Alto Networks service evaluation has continued since the last quarterly update and is completing a service evaluation on Palo Alto Prisma Access, Cloud, Security Operations Automation, Next-Generation Endpoint,

and Network Detection and Response. The NET+ Palo Alto program held an Internet2 NET+ Palo Alto - Enabling Secure Remote Learning for International Students Community Call and the recording, slides, and Palo Alto Prisma Access Service for international students resources are available.  

CloudChecker Premium Update

NET+ CloudCheckr Premium service evaluation has entered the final stages, with agreement negotiations underway. This offering will include total visibility for cloud spending across the three most highly adopted cloud infrastructure providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Service features will include delegation of access to individual account owners on a campus, access to APIs to automate billing reports, and provide visibility to the security posture of a campus’ cloud footprint. The program is expected to launch in early 2021.

GSEfE Update: Amplified IT and Burwood conditionally selected as Resellers for GSuite Enterprise for Education (GSEfE)

The NET+ GSuite Enterprise for Education (GSEfE) Service Evaluation participating schools have completed the security, identity, accessibility, and functional evaluation of the platform. Amplified IT and Burwood were selected as Resellers for the NET+ program via a competitive process in November 2020. Agreement negotiations with Google and the two Resellers are underway, and the program is expected to go live in the early part of 2021.

NET+ airSlate/signNow to join the NET+ Program

With support from Claremont Graduate University, airSlate/signNow is expected to enter the NET+ Program as a pre-evaluation NET+ service in the early part of 2021. Services include an e-signature solution, workflow automation software, document generation, and more. A pre-service evaluation agreement will be available soon. Representatives from Claremont Graduate University, University of Rhode Island, and University of Michigan have joined the Early Adopters group to help drive the product roadmap for our Higher Education community, ensuring airSlate/signNow meets the NET+ program standards. If you are interested in more information or would like to join the Early Adopters Group please contact Dana Voss.

The NET+ Code42 program held its quarterly all subscribers town hall on October 15. This town hall is designed to keep subscribers up to date on the latest Code42 product updates, any NET+ Code42 program changes and to encourage and enable dialog amongst subscribing institutions.

The Fall 2020 Town Hall covered the following topics:

  • Program Updates and Reminders
  • Product Roadmap Update
  • Overview of Branding Changes - CrashPlan and Incyder
  • Community Topics
    • Is anyone leveraging the Code42 API to pull Crashplan data into their CMDB (eg. ServiceNow)?
    • Overview of the new SCIM integration and how it works with Azure and Google.

Subscribers may access the following materials:

Are you a subscriber to the NET+ Code42 program and need access to the files? Please click request access to the NET+ Code42 Community Google Drive folder and let us know what institution you are from.

We look forward to seeing you at our next town hall in 2021!

Our colleague Nick Young at UNCG has shared his scripts for auditing IAM settings on projects within a GCP organization. The scripts use Python on GCE, pushing the results to BigQuery. 

The scripts are available at https://github.internet2.edu/nyoung/gcp-gce-project-audit-bq

Thanks, Nick!