GPN & ARE-ON Joint Conference 2026

As higher education institutions expand their digital ecosystems, student data is increasingly shared across third-party applications and service providers, SaaS platforms, and cloud repositories—often outside direct institutional control.
This session explores how campuses can regain visibility and control over sensitive data by monitoring usage, enforcing security policies, and mitigating risk across external applications. Learn practical strategies to address key concerns such as access control, data movement, and application security—without hindering academic innovation.

Research and education networks are built to be open, collaborative, and high-performing, which also makes availability protection uniquely challenging. This session will walk through practical DDoS and application security readiness for higher education and regional networks, using real-world incident lessons and an operational decision framework attendees can take back to campus. We will cover how modern attacks combine volumetric floods, DNS pressure, application-layer disruption, bots, and API abuse; what teams should know before an incident; how to structure the first 15 minutes of response; and how shared infrastructure and Internet2-aligned services can improve resilience across member institutions.

The presentation will provide an overview of the new GlobalNOC Gateway application. The application is intended to be used by members of GlobalNOC supported networks. The initial release of the application will allow for members to gain visibility into a high level status of the network, ongoing outages, upcoming maintenances, manage contact information at their institution for notification purposes, amongst many more exciting features! In this same presentation, ARE-ON Chief Technology Officer, Scott Ramoly, will announce the release of the application for use by ARE-ON's member institutions.
Audience: CIOs / CTOs, IT Directors and Managers, Network Engineers and Administrators, Faculty and Academic Researchers

Higher Education is under attack by ghosts. I know how crazy that sounds, but according to a U.S. Department of Education press release form May 2025, approximately $90 million in federal student aid has been awarded and released to ineligible recipients in the prior three years. Your institution may have already dealt with this, is currently dealing with this, or could fall victim in the future.  Our goal in this session is to learn who these ghosts are, what they want, and discuss methods used by other institutions to stop them and mitigate resulting damage left behind.

Higher-education data centers are expected to support increasingly demanding workloads while operating within tight budget, staffing, and infrastructure constraints. At the same time, universities depend on their data centers to deliver always-on services that support teaching, research, and core institutional operations, making reliability and operational stability mission-critical. Clearly understanding and addressing key pain points is essential to sustaining these environments over time.

In this session, we will explore the most common data center fabric challenges facing higher-education institutions today and discuss practical ways to mitigate them. Rather than focusing on specific technologies or architectures, this session highlights the core considerations universities should keep in mind when planning for a more resilient and efficient data center fabric.

Tripti Sinha, President and CEO of Internet2, discusses Internet2's role in supporting state research and education networks and the evolving national R&E infrastructure landscape. From network infrastructure and cloud services to identity, research computing, and community programs, this session offers a direct look at how Internet2 and networks like GPN and ARE-ON work together to serve institutions of every type. The session also explores why collaboration is the foundation of a competitive R&E ecosystem and offers a practical look at emerging technologies that every institution should have on its radar.

As data demands continue to outpace traditional storage budgets, organizations are searching for ways to extract more performance and cost efficiency from their infrastructure without sacrificing reliability. In this talk, we explore how ZFS and Ceph — two of the most powerful open-source storage platforms available — can be scaled to new levels by adopting the same layered fault tolerance strategies that underpin the world's largest public cloud providers.
Rather than relying on a single, monolithic protection scheme, we'll examine how combining multiple levels of fault tolerance across tiered storage architectures unlocks dramatic improvements in throughput, latency, and cost-per-gigabyte. Attendees will learn how to architect storage systems that intelligently balance redundancy across media types and failure domains, mirroring the approaches used by hyperscalers to serve billions of requests daily — at a fraction of the assumed cost.
Whether you're managing a growing on-premises environment or building a private cloud alternative, this session will give you a practical framework for rethinking how your storage stack is structured, protected, and optimized for the workloads of today and tomorrow.

As K–12 districts and higher‑education institutions face increasing cybersecurity threats and compliance obligations, choosing the right Microsoft 365 licensing strategy is more important than ever. This session provides a clear, practical comparison of Microsoft 365 A3 and A5, with a focus on security capabilities, compliance requirements, and budget impact. Attendees will gain an understanding of where A3 meets institutional needs, when A5 delivers measurable value, and how to align licensing decisions with risk tolerance, staffing, and long‑term technology strategy. Participants will leave better equipped to make confident, defensible Microsoft 365 licensing decisions for their institutions.

This panel style session will cover how AI is reshaping the enterprise from the app layer down to power, cooling, and transport. This session maps the new threat surface created by AI agents, the rapid evolution of AI infrastructure, and the operational complexity that emerges when reliability and security become inseparable.

Scott Ramoly, Chief Technology Officer of ARE-ON, presents the latest updates on ARE-ON's network infrastructure, services, and technical roadmap. This session covers recent enhancements, upcoming changes, and the engineering priorities shaping how ARE-ON serves its member institutions.

Building collaborations by using non-research funding mechanisms
Using federal and state funding sources to imagine sustainability, collaborations, customer engagement.
Audience: CIOs / CTOs, Grant Administrators and PIs, Faculty and Academic Researchers

High-performance networking is evolving rapidly, delivering dramatically more capacity while fundamentally changing the cost model. This technical session examines how high-speed coherent optics are being deployed across ARE-ON's metro and regional infrastructure — what the technology enables, how it's being implemented, and what it means for the institutions and research communities ARE-ON serves.

The Statewide Quantum Computing Working Group is a multi-disciplinary collaborative initiative launched in March 2026 to establish an integrated educational framework for quantum computing curricula across Arkansas. Led by the Emerging Analytics Center at UA Little Rock, the group brings together academic faculty from the Arkansas Quantum Network, industry partners, and technical experts to bridge expertise gaps in the field. Its primary goal is to develop shared instructional materials and identify best practices for research data management and cyberinfrastructure to prepare a highly skilled STEM workforce.

The key takeaway for attendees is the opportunity to participate in the co-development of a foundational Quantum Computing Curricula designed for use by academic institutions throughout Arkansas.

Audience: CIOs / CTOs, VPs of IT, IT Directors and Managers, Network Engineers and Administrators, Cybersecurity Professionals, HPC & Research Computing Professionals, Grant Administrators and PIs, Faculty and Academic Researchers, New and Emerging IT Professionals