This article is sponsored by Catholic Education Network (CEnet)
A mission built on safety equity
A rural Catholic school with 50 staff and a stretched IT budget faces the same cyber threats as a metropolitan college with a dedicated security team. It just has a fraction of the defences.
That gap, not the technology itself, is what the Catholic Education Network (CEnet) exists to close. The not-for-profit information, communication and learning technology (ICLT) organisation was named the winner of Security Software, Tech/Hardware and Student & School Management Systems in The Educator’s Service Provider Awards 2026, recognising a shared-services model built on a blunt premise: a child’s protection shouldn’t depend on their school’s postcode or budget.
CEnet supports more than 370,000 Kindergarten to Year 12 students, teachers and administrative staff across Catholic Diocese networks spanning metropolitan, regional and rural New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. Through the network, 18 member Catholic dioceses, alongside additional customers, pool their collective scale of over 810 schools ,to secure procurement discounts and shared efficiencies that individual dioceses could not achieve independently.
Closing the cybersecurity gap for smaller schools
For smaller school communities attempting to navigate these challenges, the financial realities remain. In a disaggregated sector, enterprise-grade cybersecurity is expensive, and rural or regional schools are routinely priced out of the same protection their metropolitan counterparts take for granted. CEnet’s answer is to refuse that trade-off outright, pooling the sector’s collective weight to negotiate the kind of defence individual schools never could, collaborating with cybersecurity partners to deliver threat intelligence directly to schools and dioceses without piling more administrative work onto already-stretched local teams.
“By embracing unity within the diversity of our sector, we actively enable the crowdsourcing of threat intelligence indicators of compromise, and other cyber security resources throughout the network, allowing our sector to overcome the prohibitive costs of enterprise-grade controls,” says Ian Gregory, head of architecture and cybersecurity. “This federated, shared-services model provides our sector with robust, economical defences, showing that our true strength comes from our collaborative efforts.”
cesignal: an early-warning system at machine speed
At the sharp end of that model is cesignal, CEnet’s national Attack Surface Monitoring (ASM) capability – a proactive early-warning system that doesn’t wait for an incident to happen. It continuously ingests threat intelligence across every internet-facing asset in the network, hunting down external vulnerabilities and automating rapid threat containment, including phishing takedowns and malicious URL blocking, at machine speed.
This year alone, the service has flagged tens of thousands of compromised credentials across the sector and proactively alerted on more than 2,500 critical vulnerabilities that would otherwise have gone undetected.
Crowdsourcing defence through the CSN
No single diocese fights this battle alone. The Catholic Education Cyber Security Network (CSN) enables a two-way sharing of threat intelligence indicators of compromise across the federated sector, an effort backed by more than 220 Cyber and IT practitioners who would otherwise be undertaking threat-hunting work in isolation.
Building on this momentum, the CSN facilitates sector-wide collaboration that crowdsources collective intelligence, sharing critical insights and best practices so one school or school system’s security breakthrough becomes everyone's advantage. CEnet reports that this unified approach acts as a powerful "force multiplier" across participants – transforming isolated efforts into a shared defensive shield where a single collaborative effort benefits every diocese instead of separate IT teams reinventing the same wheel.
“How we protect our kids and serve our schools”
Gregory doesn’t separate the technical mission from the moral one.
“Through our distinct role within Catholic Education, we uphold a core dedication to safety equity, expanding our cybersecurity capabilities to serve the common good by protecting information assets throughout the wider Australian Catholic education network.”
And Shannon Hartley, enterprise architect at CEnet, is just as unequivocal about what’s actually at stake behind the architecture diagrams.
“Architecture and security aren’t just IT tick-boxes, they’re how we protect our kids and serve our schools,” he says. “By balancing subsidiarity and solidarity, good architecture lets dioceses innovate locally while safeguarding the common good.”
Being recognised as a top Service Provider highlights CEnet's belief that collaboration, rather than budget constraints, determines if a Catholic school community remains vulnerable. For CEnet, this approach is not a marketing strategy - it is their core operating model.