Cloud Computing Strategy

The transformation of computing services to the cloud paradigm is an industry-wide phenomenon which presents radical challenges and opportunities to how the University provides IT services. Cloud will affect most aspects of the University’s IT, including Management, Operations, Procurement, Budgeting, Security, and Compliance.

In January this year, the Knowledge Strategy Committee approved the University’s strategy for responding to these challenges and opportunities. The strategy covers a range of related topics, from applications to hardware. It says that the University will:

Adopt ways of managing and integrating IT applications which are hosted remotely by the vendors themselves, instead of being run by us in our data centres, in order to provide a reliable and improved service to the University
Provide a service for research groups and other users to buy and use appropriate public cloud services, in order to provide a flexible service, to protect against unexpected costs, and to avoid data protection problems.
Procure and install on-premise infrastructure to host our legacy on-premises services and provide an agile platform for cloud-native application development and service delivery.
Train and support members of staff in the use and support of these new technologies, so that we can make effective use of new opportunities.
Plan which of our existing IT applications will move to a cloud platform, in order to reduce costs and to protect or increase service levels.

It is best to think of cloud not as a place where software runs but as a new operating model for how IT services are paid for, developed and used. The University will implement cloud infrastructure in our own data centres as well as using cloud services provided by external vendors. The combination of cloud infrastructure and applications built to run on that infrastructure – called cloud-native applications – offer improved scalability, flexibility, resilience and availability.