I’ve purposely been avoiding posts for a while as our Prairie Line Express initiative would have likely been the elephant in the room. As we wind down the first phase of that initiative, it’s time to start posting again.
KanREN is a week and a half away from our 2017 Annual meeting. My post this morning is a reflection on where we are as I head into preparing for the meeting. In no particular order:
- Our FY18 budget, approved back in January finally began to provide some financial relief to our universities in the form of service volume scaling.
- We’re very comfortable with a 100Gbps/10Gbps hybrid backbone now… oh yeah, with increased reliability too.
- We’ve started a project to build a “sub-ring” in Kansas City for growing member needs there.
- We’re in the middle of an initiative (with a pilot service) to make gigabit service affordable to typical KanREN members.
- We are leading the nation with no-cost inclusion of comprehensive DDoS mitigation and scrubbing for FY18.
- About to unwrap substantially improved internal/external network monitoring and visualization tools.
- Finishing a complete overhaul of our business documents and processes around them (thank you Finance Committee!!!).
- Have been working hard to stay committed to longer-term objectives and measuring your progress.
- And have seen more desire to serve on our board of directors from the membership than I’ve seen in many, many years.
- …This may be my favorite. The Capital planning/reserve program started many years ago have now been fully utilized for a complete cycle of backbone and CPE replacement. Without assessments to our members.
I don’t want to say it’s all coming up roses at KanREN, but as I move into annual meeting presentation mode, I think even in these uncertain times for education in Kansas, we’re as strong as ever — We owe that to a dedicated staff and an involved membership.