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Your Digital Edition of 30 Years of the ICN has Arrived!

icn.iowa.gov

October 2023

Battle Against Hackers

In 2022, ICN's CIO, Ryan Mulhall sat down with Dan Winters from WHO 13 to talk about cybersecurity and highlighted the ICN.   Mulhall explained as an Internet service provider, ICN has visibility on millions of network events that would be considered malicious traffic on our customers’ Networks and our State Network. Those attempts could include probing and scanning the Network to see if there are ways to break in, or actual attempts to get somewhere they shouldn’t, every day.   🔒 To learn about our security efforts, read our article: Battle Against Hackers.

ICN's Internet Service Has Come a Long Way

In 2021, ICN's CTO, Scott Pappan, had a goal to provide a superior technology infrastructure and create an advantage for our customers. The agency was able to accomplish that goal by successfully connecting to a new Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Chicago using Equinix. The infrastructure leverages transport and peering for connectivity to all of the national content providers (i.e. Amazon, Azure/Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and more), which ensures the delivery of network services to our customers. The addition of the connection to the Chicago IXP, along with our existing IXP connection in Denver, provides additional network resilience and security for our customers. Read a statement about our Internet Exchange Points. Peering has been a consistent topic since 2000, when ICN started peering with a local Internet Service Provider to share common Internet traffic. We highlighted our improvements for Faster ICN Internet Service in the May/June 2000 edition of Fiber Optic Lines.

Impact Statements

One of the most important pieces of celebrating our anniversary is thanking our customers, partners, and others that have had an impact. ICN would not be successful without this support.

👉 Read how the Network has made an impact.

Network Upgrades Support Health Care in Rural Iowa

ICN's partnership with the Iowa Rural Health Telecommunications Program (IRHTP) and Iowa Hospital Association was highlighted by GCN in January 2022.

The article explained that the entire IRHTP infrastructure was based on a 10GB infrastructure. “All that infrastructure is actually a redundant design so one fails over the other," said ICN's CTO, Scott Pappan. "I can lose a core device, I can lose an aggregation device, but now because of the design infrastructure, I fail [over] to another device. Our whole goal is that the network never goes down.”

The end of the article references, "ICN’s true success is a result of its partners, Pappan said. “I think the whole public/private partnership is the reality of the future,” he said. “This is a great example of how the public/private partnership comes together and works for everybody.”

➡️ Read the story: Network upgrades support health care in rural Iowa

Has the Network Impacted You?

Share your story with the ICN by emailing icn.info@iowa.gov.

Other 30 Year Highlights

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