NET+ Areas of Interest

[Bob Flynn <>]

Colleagues,

 

Happy New Year and welcome back to the higher ed cloud technology conversation, already in progress!

 

As I alluded to in the original email below, I put out a call to the community to identify the greatest areas of need for tooling to help cloud professional run the major cloud platforms at scale at their institutions. That call included a survey and that survey produced some decent results.

In a three-way tie at the top of the response survey were 1) account automation and maintenance, 2) security monitoring and remediation, and 3) cost tracking management and savings. The solutions had to be multi-cloud and pass muster with institutional security and compliance. One tool that was specifically suggested by multiple respondents in these areas was cloudtamer.io.

 

Cloudtamer.io has since changed its name to Kion, but we are still interested to see if their tools will meet these needs. I confess that it’s an intriguing model because it’s not SaaS. You set it to run in one of your own accounts. You can manage multiple platforms from one place. It ticks all those boxes from the survey. 

 

So given the interest, I reached out to Kion to ask them to give a higher-education-focused demo so I could invite all of you. Here are the details. Please share them with your colleagues on the cloud team.

 

I hope you can come! I’d really like your feedback on whether this looks interesting enough to pursue a relationship with Kion that brings the voice and concerns of higher ed to the table.

 

• What: Demo of Kion.io’s cloud enablement tools with a focus on higher education enterprise cloud use
• When: Tuesday January 11 at 11am PST/2pm EST
• Where: Register for zoom link
• Will it be recorded? Yes. I’ll post the recording link on the Higher Ed Cloud Community page

 

Regards,

 

Bob Flynn (he/him/his)

Program Manager

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

Internet2 NET+ Services

 || 812.558.0323

 

From: Bob Flynn <>
Date: Friday, June 4, 2021 at 13:15
To:
Subject: You're the boss of me

Colleagues,

 

For those of you who don’t know me, I have been a member of the higher ed cloud community for many years, most of them managing cloud at Indiana University. Earlier this year I left IU and took up a position at Internet2 to manage the Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services portfolio. Sounds impressive, right? I know! Well, that portfolio contains NET+ AWS, NET+ GCP and, until now, nothing else. Not much of a portfolio, more like a locket with photos of my two besties.

 

Everyone managing or working with public cloud at their institutions knows that you don’t just use the provider and their native tools. There are orchestration tools, monitoring tools, development tools, cost management tools. Success requires cloud training, engagement frameworks, and much more. While not everyone one of our schools need all of these, everyone needs some of them. The job of the NET+ program is to listen to you to find out what is needed and then to work to see if we can build enough interest in working together to fill that need. I need you to tell me what to do.

 

I’m preparing to start a short series of blog posts to try to spark some conversation about what services we should be pursuing in this space. Please start thinking about where your needs could be helped by contracts, programs, agreements, collective action. We’ll explore all kinds of things. I’ll kick this off in a week or so.

 

In the meantime, last week we launched four new NET+ programs. At least two of them fall roughly into this space and, as luck would have it, there are some deep dives coming up. I’d like to encourage you all to come check them out, particularly next week’s ClloudCheckr webinar. You’ll see a little demo. You’ll hear from each of the schools that participated in the service evaluation. Most importantly, you’ll see how we can work together to make these services easier for you to evaluate and use. So set aside an hour (or two), see what this particular service can do for you (if anything) and use it to spark a discussion on what efforts I can marshal for you, the boss, going forward.

 

Introducing NET+ CloudCheckr

• Demo, service evaluation participants favorite features, contract details and onboarding information
• Thursday, June 10 at 12pm PT/3pm ET
• Details and Registration

 

NET+ Palo Alto Networks Community Call

• Series of town hall gatherings to discuss the breadth of elements in the NET+ offering. 
• Thursday, July 15 at 10am PT/1pm ET the topic is “Cloud-native security for workloads and SaaS applications” 
• Details and Registration

 

Have a great weekend!

 

Bob Flynn

Program Manager

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

Internet2 NET+ Services

 || 812.558.0323