High Speed Secure Data Transfer for Research and Higher Education

Campus IT networks are the lifeblood of many researchers, educators and students. They provide a platform for researchers and students to exchange information and collaborate to find answers to really big questions more effectively. Over the past few years, many groups owning and operating these high-speed backbones have extended connectivity to K-12 schools, libraries, hospitals, laboratories, and government organizations to enable cost-effective, interactive online services that benefit us all. For the IT professionals responsible for operating research and higher education networks, it’s a constant struggle to balance their academic openness and the need for data security across a variety of networks.

Connectivity is the foundation for research and higher education networks, linking together 1000s of institutions and commercial industries that engage with academic research and education. The goal of RENs is to extend collaboration and productivity beyond the physical location, supporting data-intensive and time-critical applications such as large file transfers, computer modelling and simulations, application sharing, remote instrumentation and visualization as well as videoconferencing. The key technologies that enable global high-velocity research and secure high-velocity collaboration are VPNs.

High-performance VPNs are essential building blocks for securing the delivery and consumption of time-critical data across the research and education networks. IPsec VPN, the standard deployment for site-to-site connections, uses encrypted tunnels for connectivity and protection of the data that traverses it. As research and education networks extend their reach to interconnect other networks around the world, ensuring pervasive data security at all links of the network becomes more critical.

VPNs that are based on the IPsec protocol suite offer a cost-effective, scalable solution for higher education institutions seeking to securely connect campuses to the research community. IPsec provides robust security and encryption functionalities to protect critical data across any IP network. Given the current risks to security, educational institutions are showing a heightened interest in securing more data, especially as it moves across the network. Encryption is becoming an increasingly important means of ensuring pervasive data security. However, current infrastructures do not provide the capability to support this security strategy at scale. Colleges and universities are seeking to better secure their data and research information in transit without affecting network performance and collaborator productivity.

Securing the Culture of Openness

The distributed nature of today’s research community and the growing complexity of RENs require a holistic strategy to provide the network performance, resiliency, and security needed to drive collaboration, achieve operational efficiency, and guarantee overall investment protection. With increasing focus around data security, the ability to encrypt more traffic across the networks becomes a priority. However, a new model is needed – one that supports end-to-end high-performance encryption from the desktop to the cloud..

The Brocade® pervasive data security solution challenges the common belief that ensuring data security in high-speed networks is costly and complex and compromises network performance. Educators can now more easily deploy an end-to-end network encryption solution using standards-based strong encryption that is built into Brocade networking hardware and software.. The IPsec security capabilities and interoperability of these products offer a wide variety of ways to leverage end-to-end consolidated network and encryption to achieve research and collaboration objectives.

Both the Brocade MLXe Router and the Brocade ICX 7450 Switch integrate IPsec encryption via IPsec modules. The IPsec modules leverage programmable hardware technology to provide hardware-based acceleration for IPsec VPNs using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

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