Our last update to the community was in September 2018 and it’s been another active year in the NET+ Duo program! In collaboration with Internet2 and Duo Security, now part of Cisco, the program allows accredited U.S.-based institutions to deploy Duo’s multi-factor authentication (MFA) broadly, efficiently and cost-effectively. There are a couple updates we want to share with the community on the NET+ Duo service advisory board, other updates in the program, and future plans.

Updates from the NET+ Duo Service Advisory Board

First, I’d like to thank Jacob Farmer from Indiana University for his service to the NET+ Duo service advisory board as he steps down as he transitioned to a new position at IU. Doug Streit from Old Dominion University volunteered to be the new advisory board chair and has taken over the helm. David Allen from Pacific Lutheran University was added to the advisory board to help represent smaller campuses and Shane Wolfe from the Space Telescope Science Institute was added to help represent the higher education research community.

The NET+ Duo Service Advisory Board (SAB) Membership is now:

  • Doug Streit, Old Dominion University - chair
  • Justin Robinson, Indiana University
  • Roger Safian, Northwestern University
  • David Allen, Pacific Lutheran University
  • Jay Hoff, Penn State University
  • Shane Wolfe, Space Telescope Science Institute
  • Todd Haddaway, University of Maryland Balitmore County
  • Ryan Laus, Cisco Duo Security
  • Nick Lewis, Internet2

One of the items the advisory board worked on in 2019 was developing a charter which outlines the roles, responsibilities, and goals. The charter can be found on the wiki here.

Updates in the last year

Over the last year, Duo has worked with individual campuses on their transition to the updated program. This transition has gone smoothly with only a handful of campuses still to transition to the updated program based on their renewal date. Duo has continued to sign-up new campuses while transitioning the existing campuses!

We did a follow-up blog post with the National Cybersecurity Alliance, Duo and EDUCAUSE on MFA usage in higher education using the NET+ Duo program. A couple of the highlights from the blog are from the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service reported MFA use in higher education has almost tripled for institution-wide deployments of MFA from 6% to 17%. The 2018 CDS data shows an increase from 73% to 92% of institutions that are either tracking, planning, have partially deployed, or deployed institution-wide MFA on their campus. The NET+ Duo program has also grown almost 18% in the last year! With this growth, millions more faculty, staff, and students are now protected.

The advisory board has also discussed Cisco’s acquisition of Duo several times with Duo management, with the last update on the 1 year anniversary of the October 2018 acquisition. The group asked questions around any potential pricing, product, or strategic engagement changes coming in the future and Duo said none were planned. Duo said it expects higher education engagement to continue as it has for the last 5+ years and will continue to focus on growth without impact on its existing success in higher education. We will check-in with Duo in April.

Discussions over the last year have also covered service stability, usage of the service in China, product updates like API call limits, telephony and app usage aspects, program growth, formalizing the advisory board including the charter mentioned earlier, and future activities including a future survey for the advisory board.

We also started a NET+ Duo program community wiki at:

https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/yQGJCQ

This is in addition to the resources posted on the NET+ Duo program website:

https://www.internet2.edu/products-services/cloud-services-applications/duo-security/

The wiki is part of the overall NET+ program efforts to drive community engagement and share resources with the community. More to come on the wiki and if there are more resources you would find helpful, please let us know.

Future plans for the program

During the charter development, the advisory board agreed on two high level future activities around a survey of the community and increasing community engagement. The advisory board has been discussing what a campus would want to know about other campuses deployments in development of the survey questions. As part of this discussion, potential use cases and best practices were discussed that could be gathered or developed as part of community engagement. If there are topics of interest to your campus, please let us know and we can potentially include it in the survey or in the future work around community engagement.

Conclusion

Thank you to the NET+ Duo advisory board members and members of the higher education community who have helped make this program such a success over the years! We will continue to engage with Duo and the service advisory board on ways to improve and further scale the program.

If you have any feedback on the program, feel free to reach out to me at nlewis@internet2.edu or the email the group.