Focus on Federal: Access New Resources and Explore How the Internet2 Community Supports Science and Innovation

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Internet2 Updates for Federal Affiliate Members

Inside this Issue

• New Resource: A Quick Internet2 Reference Guide for Government
• Events Spotlight: TechEX25 Sessions that Resonate
• Community Voices: NIH Identity Assurance and the Joint Engineering Team

Trusted by federal leaders in science and technology, Internet2’s 500+ member community includes approximately 60 affiliate and federal affiliate organizations. This inaugural Internet2 Focus on Federal newsletter highlights how federal organizations engage with and benefit from participating in the Internet2 community.

Each issue curates timely resources, events, and community updates. The newsletter also showcases how Internet2’s AI-ready hyperscale network, cloud and security services, research support, and training opportunities help advance federal missions — while fostering trusted relationships with higher education, research, state and local government, and industry collaborators.

The goal is to provide federal IT leaders with practical, community-informed insights that support planning, operations, and collaboration across mission environments.

New Resource: A Quick Reference Guide for Government  

To provide a clear, concise overview of how it supports federal government missions, Internet2 recently released a two-page reference guide, Internet2: Delivering Strategic Value to the Federal Government. 

The guide is designed as an introduction to Internet2 and can support internal briefings, strategic planning, and early-stage evaluation of services and collaboration opportunities. It highlights Internet2’s core services that enable scalable networking, cloud connectivity, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, and secure collaboration. It also outlines key differentiators — including architectural control, unmatched visibility, cost efficiency, and access to a global community with science, research, and engineering expertise — that set Internet2 apart.

Events Spotlight: TechEX25 Sessions That Resonate

Internet2 hosts dozens of webinars, workshops, training sessions, and community events each year, spanning IT topics from the campus to the cloud. These events play an important role in the Internet2 community’s innovation ecosystem.

The 2025 Internet2 Technology Exchange (TechEX25), held Dec. 8-12 in Denver, offered more than 25 sessions daily across four tracks: Advanced Networking, Cloud Technology, Information Security, and Identity and Access Management. Open to both Internet2 members and non-members, TechEX is a technical forum where practitioners from government, higher education, research, and industry surface challenges and collaborate on new solutions.

While many sessions are widely applicable, the following TechEX25 sessions are particularly relevant to the federal space. Where slides or recordings are unavailable, session titles can still serve as entry points for follow-up discussion with peers or Internet2 community subject matter experts.

• DWDM Fiber Optic Networking Concepts and Technologies (Slides)
• Rethink Campus Wireless Connectivity – Wi-Fi, Private 5G, Neutral Host, and More (Recap)
• Hands-On Tutorial on Infrastructure Workload Offloading UsingSmartNICs/DPUs
• Cloudy Networking Updates: Internet2 Cloud Connect, Cloud Exchange, Cloud Router (Slides)
• BGP For Data Centers: Designing, Deploying, and Troubleshooting BGP in a Leaf-Spine Architecture
• Network Troubleshooting with Generative AI

Cloud

Architecture, Security, and Sustainability

• Rebuilding Cost Models: How FinOps Helped APTrust Shape a Sustainable Business Strategy for Long-Term Preservation (Recording | Slides)
• Next-Gen Firewalls in AWS w/ MSR + GWLB (Slides)
• AWS GameDay

Information Security

Operations and Threat Protection, Detection, and Mitigation

• National Wide Cybersecurity Capacity Building through Distributed Security Operation Centers (Slides)
• Introducing Internet2’s Online RPKI-ROA Planning Tool (Recording)
• Uninterrupted Service: Using AI to Battle Cyber Threats Without Downtime (Slides)

Identity and Access Management

Identity Assurance

• Bridging Research and Security: NIH’s Identity Assurance Transformation for Controlled Access Data (Recording | Slides)

For additional content from over 35 select sessions, access the full TechEX25 video playlist. Explore more topics and share insights with your team. 

Mark your calendar and plan to participate in the 2026 Internet2 Technology Exchange, Oct. 26-30, in Minneapolis. Federal organizations are encouraged to participate in this technical forum to share expertise and exchange insights. Watch for the upcoming TechEX26 Call for Proposals to get involved. 

Or, if you are looking to extend technical topics to broader strategic conversations, join us in Chicago, April 13-16, for the 2026 Internet2 Community Exchange. The program is anticipated to include a session on federal policy updates, featuring community members from multiple agencies.

From the Community 

Preparing for NIH’s New Identity Assurance Requirements

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is streamlining and securing access to its Controlled Access Data Repositories (CADRs) by integrating them with Researcher Auth Services (RAS) and requiring higher identity assurance and identity proofing for CADR users. 

To support this transition, InCommon, powered by Internet2, has multiple efforts underway to help institutions prepare. The InCommon Federation has been added to NIH’s list of approved brokers for RAS and is expected to support higher Identity Assurance Levels (NIST IAL2/REFEDS IAP High), helping streamline secure access for researchers and institutions.

Joint Engineering Team Continues as a Community of Interest

Internet2 will continue to support the Joint Engineering Team (JET), now as a voluntary community of interest for cross-sector collaboration. Originally formed under the now-sunset NITRD program, JET has long served as a conduit for information sharing among federal agencies and non-federal collaborators focused on high performance computing, research, engineering, and networking to support science. JET was part of NITRD’s broader efforts to develop IT capabilities that empower federal missions and support U.S. science, engineering, and technology leadership and economic competitiveness.

Following discussions with a small planning group and two meetings with former JET members at SC25 and TechEX25, participants agreed there is strong value in carrying JET forward. As a community of interest, JET will continue to support cross-sector collaboration among academic research and education networks, federal and state research and engineering networks, and those interested in these networks and related services. Bringing together these diverse perspectives creates space for broader knowledge sharing and collective problem-solving.

Join JET or learn more about the new community of interest format by emailing JET@internet2.edu.