CENIC is deeply committed to helping California students and educators build the future

California Community Colleges are the largest higher education system in the US, offering millions of students a path to vocational opportunities and a springboard to four-year universities. Whether training firefighters, educating nurses, or providing transfer students to other members of the state’s higher education system, California’s community colleges play an indispensable role in shaping the future.

CENIC is helping those leaders of tomorrow–and those who educate them–succeed by providing the significant network and security capabilities community colleges throughout the state require. In partnership with CENIC, you’re connected to a global research and education community so your faculty and students can accomplish what they seek to do: kickstart their careers.

California's Community Colleges in Action with CENIC

California’s Community Colleges are uniquely and deeply integrated with every other segment. Many of their students arrive from the state’s K–12 system, while 51% of California State University graduates and 29% of University of California graduates began their academic career at a community college. They also welcome many returning, working, and other nontraditional students and prepare them for a wide variety of careers. For example, in California, seven out of 10 nurses and eight out of 10 firefighters, police officers, and EMTs received their training at a California Community College. 

Together, California’s Community Colleges and CENIC have built a profound partnership to ensure that the country’s largest higher education system meets its mission of putting students first. Thanks to that partnership, all 116 community colleges, along with their off-campus sites, enjoy future-facing networking and services via CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN), specially designed by and for the state’s research and education community.

An example of the benefits of this partnership is the connection of the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) to the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR), a distributed compute and storage infrastructure interconnected by CalREN and designed for AI and machine learning research and instruction, and to which CENIC members contribute resources voluntarily. The SDCCD is the first district to connect to CENIC AIR, but others are discussing participation.

To forestall network-based volumetric cyberattacks and other threats, CENIC Charter Associates can access Radware’s on-demand, cloud-based DDoS Mitigation Service (DMS). Thanks to our partnership with Internet2, CENIC obtains for its members an extremely attractive "bulk" pricing for this service that they would not otherwise enjoy, along with high-capacity direct connections through Internet2 to Radware. 

Thus, many of California’s Community Colleges contract with CENIC to obtain DDoS attack detection and mitigation services that are far more responsive and cost-effective than any currently available from commercial providers.

CENIC partners with national and international research and education networks, governmental networks, and commercial networks to expand access, working to support broad public access to the educational, research, and cultural assets that position California for a prosperous future.

Nearly Twenty-Five Years of Milestones