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.

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.

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.

This presentation will explore how Hewlett Packard Enterprise Networking solutions are helping transform student housing environments through AI-driven connectivity, automation, and security. We’ll discuss how modern campus networks can improve resident experiences, streamline IT operations, and support the growing demand for smart devices and high-bandwidth applications. Attendees will also learn how AI-powered analytics and management tools can proactively identify issues, optimize performance, and enhance operational efficiency across student living communities. The session will include practical use cases, emerging trends, and strategies for building scalable, future-ready housing networks.

As organizations scale AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and data-intensive workloads, traditional air-cooling methods are increasingly challenged by rising power densities and thermal demands. Liquid cooling technology offers a transformative approach to data center infrastructure, enabling organizations to achieve higher performance while improving energy efficiency and sustainability outcomes. This session explores how Lenovo's advanced liquid cooling solutions help organizations optimize compute performance, reduce energy consumption, and increase rack density without compromising reliability.