The NET+ Service Evaluation Process is a member driven approach to evaluate cloud services to ensure the meet common standards for the research and education community.
The key steps of the service evaluation process include: functional assessment; comprehensive security assessment; federated identity integration; network integration and testing; and completion of a business and customer agreement. The sponsor and all other institutions participating in the Service Evaluation process work very closely on all of these steps.
Functional Assessment
- Review current features and functionality
- Discuss existing Service Provider product roadmap (under NDA)
- Tune service for research and education community
- Prioritize feature requests
- Process and Deliverables: customized roadmap for higher education from the Service Provider; feature, functionality, and bug report prioritization from the universities
Technical Integration
- Network: Route service over Internet2 Network and optimize
- Test the network connection to create benchmarks
- Identity: Review Service Provider’s identity strategy and determine InCommon integration. Also review the list of Identity Integration resources.
- Process and Deliverables: Service Provider and participating universities assign technical team members on networking and identity; develop and review testing plans; and produce reference documents for service subscribers
Security & Compliance
- Security assessment: Higher Education Cloud Vendor Assessment Tool (HECVAT)
- Accessibility review and roadmap commitment to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA and provide/complete Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)
- Data handling:
- FERPA, HIPAA, privacy, data handling
- Process and Deliverables: Service Provider completes HECVAT for review by universities; campus accessibility engineers review service and communicate needs to Service Provider
Business & Legal
- Legal: customized agreement using NET+ community standards
- Facilitation Agreement between Internet2 and Service Provider
- Customer Agreement between Internet2 members and Service Provider
- Introduce distributor and reseller where appropriate
- Business Model: customized approach to pricing
- Aggregates community usage to reduce costs to Service Provider; and
- Provide savings and additional value to universities
- Process and Deliverables: Parties negotiate business agreements, customer agreements and any associated terms of use
Deployment
- Documentation: Review Service Provider’s standard materials
- Customize for the research and education community
- Use cases: Service Evaluation schools test and document use cases
- Support model:
- Universities provider Tier 1 support to end users
- Service Provider for Tier 2/3 support via named contacts from each university
- Process and Deliverables: Service Provider and Members work together to develop customized materials for higher education