Thematic Areas
Thematic areas are formed and continuously evolving from the needs of the GÉANT community.
Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Task Forces (TFs), specialised workshops and collaborative projects are all activities within the thematic areas. Explore the boxes below to read about the different thematic areas, their activities and objectives.
Security
This is a broad area, concerned with the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information and information systems. GÉANT's activities include defining and implementing appropriate security requirements for various types of systems. One requirement common to many systems is incident response: detecting and investigating failures and restoring the system to its intended security state.
Identity & Privacy
Middleware is a general term that in this context refers to the layer between the network and the applications running on it. Middleware provides an interface to, and between, the applications, easing their interoperability, simplifying access by users, and allowing better management. GÉANT's middleware activities focus on identity management federations, harmonisation and standardisation of interfaces, access control, service location and diagnostics, and involve liaison with other communities when relevant. This area also addresses user and application mobility in a networked environment.
Education
This activity focuses on collaboration across the education sector on commonly identified topic areas, providing a coordinated approach to improve NREN educational services and activities.
Network Technologies
This area is concerned with organisational aspects, coordination and exchange of best practice regarding the provisioning and delivering of network services. Work in this area supports research on network technology and innovative network services. Campus networking is included in this area.
Media Services
This area encompasses information exchange and best practice in traditional and web-based collaboration, webcasting and video-on-demand solutions, while at the same time providing a platform for activities supporting live media and videoconferencing. GÉANT's activities in this field vary from the investigation of next generation real-time communication services to the establishment of rich media production and recording solutions, metadata and content repositories as well as distribution platforms.
Cloud Services
Virtualisation generally refers to abstraction of resources, usually creating a logical view of resources while hiding the underlying arrangement of various physical elements including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. This area also includes the investigation of in-house services using private clouds and of services outsourced to public clouds.
Organisational Services
This activity deals with organisational, information gathering/exchange and delivery aspects of services provided to the community and by the community.
Support Services
This area caters for the support requirements of end users and the community at large with the aim to develop a framework for research engagement.
Health Services
This area is aimed at enhancing coordination, exchange of best practices and sharing knowledge among the NRENs and the activities they are individually carrying out to support their eHealth User Communities.
