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As we begin 2026, it’s worth reflecting on what we learned from 2025. From a year of cloud town halls, tech shares, strategy calls, tech jams, and hands-on community sessions, these conversations revealed where the community’s attention was focused — and which practices drove real results.
Across the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) and broader Internet2 cloud engagements, five themes resurfaced again and again, comprised of institutional stories that moved from experimentation to execution to effective strategy.
What became apparent was this: most cloud progress in higher education extends beyond IT, depending on coordination across security, infrastructure, finance, research, accessibility, and teaching and learning. This progress also depends on cross-institutional collaboration and on vendor relationships that go beyond a transactional contract.
That’s where the Internet2 NET+ program and CICP matter most. They pair community-vetted services with an active community of practice that shares patterns, reduces duplication, and helps institutions move faster with less risk.
Editor’s note: This year’s themes didn’t come from a single conversation, but a host of notes, slides, transcripts, and resources. We used the forthcoming CICP Knowledge Assistant — a tool trained on digital notes, media, and materials from all 2025 CICP events.
It helped us surface patterns across dozens of community conversations and compile them into a year-defining summary. It’s one example of how NET+ community resources extend beyond services to include shared tools that help institutions learn from each other. Watch a short video showing how the tool works. |
1. AI on Campus: From “What If” to “Here’s How.”
If 2024 was about AI curiosity, 2025 was about execution.
Institutions demonstrated practical deployments that strengthened campus communities and measurably enhanced student engagement.
One example is The Campus Engagement Coach, developed by Washington University in St. Louis and Google’s Rapid Innovation Team. This AI-powered application delivers personalized recommendations for campus events. It helps students navigate complex university environments, with highly engaged students demonstrating better academic outcomes, higher GPAs, and an increased sense of belonging on large campuses. All CICP subscribers can learn more about this tool in the CICP knowledge hub.
While Washington University’s successes centered on student engagement, Google’s AgentSpace demonstrations and AWS’s Innovation Sandbox proved successful AI initiatives were mission-driven first, technology-driven second, with the most effective cases focused on controlled experimentation environments and appropriate governance frameworks.
The bottom line is that what works are institutions with clear use cases, strong governance, and the willingness to learn from peers.
Want to join a community of practice? The Generative AI Community of Practice has grown to 65+ institutions and 200+ members, creating a trusted space for sharing implementation strategies and navigating AI’s implications.
2. FinOps Grows Up: From Cost Control to Strategic Discipline
In 2025, cloud financial management stopped being a niche specialty and is now shared responsibility.
Community conversations — anchored by FinOps for the R&E Community: A Virtual Conference — highlighted a shift. FinOps now balances cost, performance, sustainability, and mission.
Discussions explored how FinOps principles apply to AI workloads (where costs can spike unpredictably) and how sustainability considerations are integrated into financial decisions.
Institutions managing significant cloud spending shared a consistent lesson: AI-related workloads and research computing were the primary drivers of growth, and those with FinOps frameworks proactively managed costs.
FinOps has evolved from tracking spending to shaping decisions. Check out the November GCP Tech Jam on Managing GCP Finances and the September session on cost overruns for more practical lessons learned.
3. Data Strategy Matures: Collaboration Becomes the Advantage
Many institutions collected data in 2025, but few had alignment.
The 2025 NET+ AWS Town Hall on Modern Data Strategy offered institutions a holistic framework built on three pillars:
- mindset shifts that empower technologists as builders,
- people and processes aligned around shared goals, and
- technology tools like AWS SageMaker Studio that support scalable, team-oriented solutions.
If you’re a CICP subscriber, please check out the AWS framework.
Throughout the year, we saw institutions move beyond simply collecting data to building comprehensive strategies that transform information into institutional impact.
Examples include GCP’s Looker dashboard management discussions and AWS’s data governance explorations with SageMaker Unified Studio. Both strategies highlighted the tension between democratizing data access and protecting sensitive information.
The common thread? Data strategy succeeded when it served its mission — not when it existed as a standalone IT initiative.
4. Security, Compliance, and Accessibility Take Center Stage
Community conversations throughout 2025 made one reality clear: modern cloud environments are too complex for manual security oversight.
Institutions embraced automation, continuous monitoring, and security-by-design principles to manage growing cloud environments without growing staff. Practical examples emerged throughout the year, such as AWS Landing Zone Accelerator deployments,root account access management, and Service Control Policies. These all prevented expensive mistakes.
The community’s move toward Infrastructure as Code with tools like OpenTofu represented a broader shift toward codifying security policies alongside infrastructure definitions. Concurrently, accessibility became increasingly important as institutions prepared for the April 2026 ADA Title II deadline, requiring all digital course materials to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards.
A pivotal moment occurred during the May AWS Barn Raising, where institutions collaborated to deploy Indiana University’s Automated Transcription Service, transforming what typically costs thousands per project into a shared, scalable solution. Learn more about the AWS Barn Raising.
5. Research Computing Moves Center Stage
The community is shifting from general adoption to sharing proven tools and strategies for cost-effective cloud research enablement.
These community conversations focused on specialized solutions:
- Cluster Toolkit for rapid Slurm deployment demonstrated how institutions enable high-performance computing workloads in the cloud for genomics, climate modeling, and compute-intensive research, helping institutions decide which approach makes sense.
- AWS Innovation Sandbox and Service Control Policies showed how institutions create controlled environments while preventing cost overruns.
- UC Irvine’s success in managing six petabytes of research storage on S3 at minimal cost proved that the cloud can be cost-effective for research at scale.
- Cloud Skills Boost training programs recognized that research support extends beyond infrastructure to researcher enablement, building ecosystems that enable discovery while maintaining necessary security and compliance frameworks.
All examples prove that research support thrives when infrastructure involves an understanding of research workflows and the research community.
Looking Forward
These five themes show that cloud is now an established practice in higher education. The focus has shifted to optimization, integration, and alignment with institutional missions. The tools and services we use give us rapid access to new capabilities, but the real differentiator is how thoughtfully we integrate them.
AI, FinOps, data strategy, security/accessibility, and research computing all require cross-functional leadership. Cloud maturity now hinges on institutional coordination, not isolated excellence.
That’s why the NET+ value proposition matters. NET+ is not just about contracts; it is a community-led model that helps institutions deploy faster, reduce risk, and share the burden of evaluation, governance, and implementation.
As we move into 2026, these themes will continue shaping our conversations, alongside new challenges that will inevitably emerge.
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