With your support as a CANARIE Member, we’ve achieved the following significant milestones across our programs and initiatives over the past year:
CANARIE Year in Review 2025-26
Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) Evolution
To support of the Government of Canada’s DRI Strategy and the broader research and education (R&E) sector, we:
- Launched our new 2025-2030 Mandate thanks to investments from the Government of Canada.
- Delivered an incremental funding proposal to the Government to fully operationalize the CanSSOC Federated SOC Pilot.
- Continued to work closely with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada to coordinate and align our activities, including in cybersecurity.
Canada’s National Research and Education Network (NREN)
To support national and international research collaboration, we:
- Enabled secure connectivity for 798 institutions through the 40,000km CANARIE backbone network.
- Upgraded the optical network in the Winnipeg-Thunder Bay-Sudbury and eastern corridors to 400G to support the connectivity needs of the R&E community.
- Supported a 1.2 Terabyte data transfer demonstration, validating recent network upgrades for data intensive research use.
- Modernized the hardware at MOXY, CANARIE’s global exchange point in Montreal, to support the upgraded transnational connectivity announced in 2025, enabling 400G connectivity directly from Canada to Europe.
- Selected and approved projects to be funded under the NREN Program, which supports our regional NREN Partners in creating, extending, and maintaining their network infrastructure and capabilities.
- Hosted the eighth annual NREN Assembly, bringing together staff from CANARIE and our 13 provincial and territorial partners to support the coordinated evolution of the services we collectively deliver.
Cybersecurity
To help strengthen the cybersecurity of Canada’s R&E sector we:
- Completed the CanSSOC Federated SOC Pilot with the goal of understanding the requirements to provide a federated, shared security operations centre for the entire R&E sector in Canada.
- Released the National Cybersecurity Assessment (NCA) Report, including a three‑year analysis, providing a national‑level view of maturity across the Canadian R&E sector to inform policy, investment priorities, and coordinated risk reduction efforts.
- Released a cybersecurity investment analysis for the R&E sector, benchmarking current investments against baseline capabilities identified in complementary cybersecurity programs.
- Received 429 incident disclosures to the CanSSOC Threat Intelligence team, which revealed that over 70% of identified indicators were net-new, demonstrating the unique value of communitygenerated threat intelligence beyond commercial and public sources.
- Launched CHECKERS, a monthly, technical threat intelligence update for security teams, with plans for a new annual executive summary to inform proactive defence, strategic planning, and budget decisions at institutions.
- Initiated the development of a cybersecurity community collaboration hub to support the pooling and sharing of resources across the Canadian R&E sector.
- Supported collaborative research & development projects funded by the Research-Intensive Group (RIG) of universities.
- Hosted the Collective Cybersecurity Workshop and participated in the Collective Cybersecurity Project Team (CCPT), contributing to a sector‑wide effort to improve coordination, reduce duplication, and strengthen cybersecurity readiness across Canada’s R&E community.
Identity and Access Management
To enable Canada’s researchers and post-secondary students, staff, and faculty to securely connect to eduroam and to a global catalogue of academic services, we:
- Authenticated nearly 533 million logins to eduroam in 2025, enabling the R&E community to seamlessly and securely connect across Canada.
- Implemented eduroam Service-Provider-as-a-Service (SPaaS) as a key function of eduroam, simplifying the roll-out eduroam in non-R&E locations.
- Launched two pilot projects to ease the adoption of both eduroam and Federated Identity Management (FIM) for smaller institutions.
- Facilitated a national consultation exploring the potential to develop an Identity & Access Management (IAM) Community of Practice for the Canadian post-secondary sector.
Canadian SecuR&E Forum
To strengthen collaboration within the diverse community that secures Canada’s R&E sector, we:
- Welcomed 150+ participants from across the sector to the 2025 SecuR&E Forum, to foster learning and knowledge-sharing across technical and executive streams. The program included presenters from federal government partners – the RCMP and Canadian Centre for Cyber Security – as well as cybersecurity researchers, institutional experts, and our regional partners from across Canada.
Thank you for your continued support of CANARIE. Your Membership and engagement help to maximize the impact of our programs and initiatives and continues to advance Canada’s research and education sector.