WACREN and the SCION are proud to announce WACREN’s connection to the SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-Generation Networks) network. This strategic milestone marks a significant step toward providing secure, resilient, and innovative networking infrastructure for researchers, educators, and academic institutions across Africa. SCION is a pioneering Internet architecture designed to address the growing need for trustworthy, high-performance, and failure-resistant networks. It underpins SCIERA (the SCION Education, Research, and Academic infrastructure)—a global initiative linking research and education communities across five continents. By joining SCIERA, WACREN now offers its member institutions a more secure and predictable communication path for research collaborations, high-speed and resilient data transfer, even during network disruptions, as well as access to a global research backbone for advanced scientific projects and e-learning initiatives. What this means for researchers and institutions Institutions connected to our NRENs can now enjoy faster, more reliable sharing of large research datasets, strengthened cybersecurity through next-generation tools like LightningFilter, and enhanced support for high-performance computing and cross-border scientific collaboration. Key SCION applications, such as Hercules File Transfer, designed to accelerate massive data transfers, and LightningFilter, offering high-speed, advanced protection for critical research data, are now within reach for African universities and research centres connected through WACREN. According to Prof. Adrian Perrig, Network Security Group Lead at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), inventor of SCION, “This is a major milestone both for the expansion of the SCION SCIERA network and WACREN, bringing access to the SCION technology to the West and Central African research and education networks, fostering path-aware networking research opportunities and collaboration”. For Dr Venant Palanga, CEO of WACREN, “This milestone positions WACREN as an active participant in shaping the future of global research and education infrastructure. This development will be exploited in the WACREN HPC network, providing trusted high-performance connections for advanced computing workloads and regional scientific discovery”. Next Steps WACREN is preparing to establish the SCION Browser Extension which will allow students, researchers and staff members of connected institutions to access web resources available via SCION as well as visualise the network path taken by the data. As WACREN interconnects High Performance Computing (HPC) centers across the region, Hercules will play a key role by enabling the transfer of large volumes of data in a significantly reduced time. WACREN will soon meet NRENs in the region to explore opportunities embedded in the SCION connection for their communities.
