— IT Services @ Bristol

cloud connections

There are many services offered over the Internet (from the ‘cloud’)  to which individuals can sign up. Some of the popular ones include Skype for video chat, Doodle for scheduling meetings, and Dropbox for cloud storage. These cloud services have many advantages, e.g. they make it easy to collaborate with people outside the University. But they also have disadvantages – as anyone who uploaded files to Megaupload.com and then found that the service disappeared overnight found.

We are adopting some cloud services for use across the University, notably the whole Google Apps suite for students, and Google Mail & Calendar for staff. When we do this, IT Services & the Secretary’s Office work together to agree a contract with the supplier which protects our data. We also do some technical work which makes the experience easier, such as integrating an external service with our Single Sign On, so you don’t have to remember yet another username and password.

But putting this in place takes time, and members of the University constantly have new requirements. So where we can, we will also provide light-touch advice on cloud services people can sign up to individually. The first example of this is the recommendation of Wuala as a more secure alternative to Dropbox. Please let us know if there are other areas you’d like help with, or have recommendations for particular tools you’ll find useful.

For any requirement, what guides us is where we can offer the better service, whether that’s in house or in the cloud. In many cases we can provide something better or more cost-effectively in-house, and will do so. Two examples of this from the last year are MyFiles, which provides gigabytes of storage space for every member of the University, and Blue Peta, which provides terabytes of space for each research group.

So increasingly staff and students will be using a mix of services:

• Cloud services such as Wuala or Skype which people signed up to individually,
• Cloud services such as Google Email & Calendar, provided University-wide,
• Services delivered in-house such as MyFiles and Blue Peta.

Over time of course the mix will change. I’d love to provide a file sync service for everyone. Will we have a University wide contract for Wuala – or Microsoft SkyDrive, or Google Drive? [we're already offering Google Drive for students, but not for staff, it only launched last week!]. Microsoft now own Skype – will we be able to offer a University version of Skype, integrated with our telephony system, so if you are away from your desk you can pick up a call on Skype instead? And the new individual cloud services will probably be for things we haven’t even heard of yet!

Image by coconinoco via Flickr

Until recently all our IT services were hosted in house. But times change, as they always do in IT. Our network connection to the outside world is fast and reliable, and we now have some externally-hosted services. We live in a mixed environment and we will continue to do so. The hokey cokey *is* what it’s all about.

But how do we know what we will host ourselves, and what we will get others to do for us? The right answer always depends on the circumstances, and must be assessed on a case by case basis. Each time a requirement arises we will decide how to meet it.

Breaking it down further, here are a few possibilities:

1. We code an application ourselves from scratch,
2. We use an established open source project (perhaps or perhaps not modifying it to our particular requirements),
3. We buy a packaged commercial product and deploy it (perhaps or perhaps not modifying it to our particular requirements),
4. We run a service ourselves, but hosted on hardware in another organisation’s data centre,
5. We subscribe to a service run for us by another organisation.

We do all of these at the moment. The last is the one I get most questions about, so here are a couple of examples.

When we introduced an online payments system a few years ago we decided to use an external firm to handle the credit card data and process the transactions. They were already in use successfully at a number of other universities. They had the experience and skills needed, and had been audited by the relevant industry bodies to ensure that their procedures were secure. Although, or perhaps because, the data security requirements were so important, it was most appropriate to use a third-party.

Another rather different example is AskIT, hosted for us by GetSatisfaction. We set up AskIT as a community forum to help support mobile IT. It was a bit of an experiment – we didn’t really know if community support would work. We needed something we could get up and running quickly without putting a lot of effort, to try it out. So we didn’t want to install, configure, customise and patch a piece of software. GetSatisfaction is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) – they do all that for us, and it’s pretty cheap.

Here’s a very general rule, although it certainly isn’t always true:

Some services:

• We both provide and use ourselves, the traditional model.
• Will be provided by someone else, we will subscribe to them (eg we subscribed to the out of hours help desk run by the University of Northumbria)
• We will be the provider and others will subscribe to us (eg we have a world-leading HPC facility, and other universities are interested in renting time on it.)
• Will be a shared service where both parties contribute assets (eg Bristol University and Bristol City Council connected their ducting together to form the shared B-Net network)

The great news is that Bristol is in a strong position for all of these options. We are positioned on the JANET national backbone, with fast resilient connections to the cloud. We work closely with other universities and organisations in the south west. Most importantly we have a strong team of highly skilled staff across IT Services. Some of our services are the envy of others across the UK, and we have an R&D unit developing new innovative technology.

We live in exciting times.