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About the Working Group:

Over the last decade, higher education has increasingly moved applications and infrastructure into the cloud. Much work has been done to consider the protection of institutional data in the cloud and some work has been done regarding the return of data (including work on data egress and deletion and return of customer data). As cloud providers mature, there we have now seen drastic changes in product focus, pricing or management/ownership that necessitate higher education institutions to evaluate moving to different solutions. 

With more and more institutions facing the same challenges, there is an opportunity for the community to come together to evaluate services and build best practices that address the needs of research and higher education. Working together allows institutions to leverage combined resources, share knowledge and speak in one voice advocating for the community.

Working Group Charge:

Participants in the NET+ program have expressed the desire to tackle these issues together. To facilitate the conversation, Internet2 is forming a working group of interested member institutions to:

  • Document best practices to avoid vendor lock-in and enable migration to, from and between services including exit strategies
  • Working with other stakeholder groups to define contract language to mitigate vendor lock in
  • Develop educational materials for other higher education institutions including a repository of use cases and webinar (or series of webinars) to engage and guide the community 
  • Work with service providers to build features and functionalities specific for Research and Higher Education.

For questions or comments, please contact Quyen Vaillant - Internet2 staff liaison - at qvaillant@internet2.edu. 

For committee members, links to agendas and minutes.

Working Group  Membership

Keith Fowlkes
E&I Cooperative Services
  Community organization representative

Daniel Guedes
The National Network of Teaching and Research (RNP)
  NREN Cloud Working Group representative

Tom Lewis
University of Washington

William Li
University of Washington

Ricardo N S Makino
The National Network of Teaching and Research (RNP)
  NREN Cloud Working Group representative

Erik Wieland
University of California, San Francisco

Nick Young
University of North Carolina at Greensboro