Companies support RIT with gifts
Gifts announced this fall will help make RIT a leader in sustainable packaging and information security.
Packaging
The Wegman Family Charitable Foundation and American Packaging Corp. are donating a total of $2.2 million to RIT to create the Center for Sustainable Packaging, an education and research center dedicated to the development and use of sustainable packaging. The center’s mission will be to deliver a unique brand of applied research solutions that will enable manufacturers to provide innovative products in a sustainable manner.
Food packaging is approximately a $340 billion industry worldwide. In the U.S., about a third of household waste is food packaging, and much of this cannot be recycled.
The center will be a testing ground for new ideas and solutions for students, researchers, faculty and corporate partners that are interested in sustainable packaging. It will also educate the next generation of packaging professionals who are intent on bringing sustainable principles to manufacturers around the world.
Security
McAfee, a dedicated security technology company, has donated $2.3 million in security hardware and software to enhance RIT’s information security, academic and research programs. The gift will serve as a core security component of RIT’s new data center, enhance the security of endpoints—such as desktops, laptops and mobile devices—and create the McAfee Interlock Lab within the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.
The new data center, which will be operational in spring 2013, will provide computing capacity and services for the RIT community, such as high-speed networking and server management. By consolidating RIT’s data and computing services into an air-cooled facility leveraging the latest in processing, storage, virtualization and security technology, RIT will improve energy-efficiency, fortify security and advance computing capacity and capabilities.
The McAfee Interlock Lab will support teaching, learning and research in areas such as mobile, endpoint, database and network security.