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
  • 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


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