This document discusses the financial pressures on universities from government budget cuts and the drivers to reduce costs through cloud computing. It provides an overview of cloud computing models and the UK government's plans to develop a shared "G-Cloud" infrastructure. While cloud computing could provide savings, there are also risks around security, compliance with regulations, and vendor lock-in that need to be considered. The document proposes creating pilot projects with commercial cloud providers and universities to prove concepts and help drive adoption across the higher education sector.

1. Migrating to Cloud Services
Henry Hughes

2. A Changing Approach
• “Too many universities operate in an outdated
way. They’ve failed to recognise the savings and
service improvements that could be obtained
through engagement with commercial partners
and the use of shared services…”
Higher Education in the Age of Austerity

3. Sector Financial Drivers
2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15
16.7 16.5 15.6 14.7 13.7
• Department of Business, Innovation and Skills
– 25% reduction over 4 years
• HE Teaching budget cut by 40% over 4 years.
– £2.9bn (£7.1-£4.2bn)
• FE Teaching budget cut by 25% over 4 years.
– £1.1bn
• Departments merging, funding difficult to access
• Funding Councils changing funding methodologies

4. Campus Drivers
– Focus on cost reduction and service improvement
• Data Centers can use >10% of power for an entire campus
– Carbon Reduction Commitment
• Impact organisations with energy usage >6,000MWh and will increase
each year
• Additional carbon-related taxation is likely
– Real estate becoming more valuable for other activities
– Problems provisioning additional power in some areas

5. What is Cloud Computing?
• Helpful NIST Definition
Characteristics Service Models Deployment Models
On-demand self-service Software as a service Private Cloud
Broad network access Platform as a service Community Cloud
Resource pooling Infrastructure as a service Public Cloud
Rapid elasticity Hybrid Cloud
Measured Service

6. Government Cloud
“The Government is currently developing proposals for G-Cloud.
This cloud computing infrastructure will enable public bodies to
select and host ICT services from a secure, resilient and cost-
effective shared environment.” – Cabinet Office
Aims –
• Reduction of ICT costs
• Improve government services and agility through use of ICT
• Reduction of carbon footprint due to Government ICT services
• Improve data centre services
• Align with other Government thinking

7. Cloud?
High
IT Delivered
commodity
“As a service”
Demand
IT Delivered
Ubiquity
product Move to commodisiation
“As a product” erodes value of the old
(Schumpeter – creative
destruction) accelerating
new innovation…
bespoke
Innovation
Improvement
Low
Low High
Certainty

8. Is it that easy?
• Significant investment in customised in-house systems, means
moving external is not simple
• Total cost of ownership is often not known, elements within with IT,
Estates and Finance functions
• Costing of IT services is a difficult task involving three interacting
variables: people, processes and technology.
• Making reliable estimates of potential cost savings is difficult
• There are concerns over data security and privacy
• There are uncertainties regarding data location and legal risks
• There are uncertainties with regard to changes to security models

9. Risks in Cloud Computing
• Useful paper “Putting Cloud security in perspective” from Capgemini
Compliance Multi-tenancy Lock-in Availability
Data Protection Act Shared storage or Difficult for PaaS Cloud services
PCI-DSS compute resource likely to offer more
Possible route for resilience
Data hosted abroad Provider Security SaaS
(US Patriot Act) What are existing
Flexibility & value Market needs to services achieving?
Safe Harbour balanced against develop in this area
Agreement security risk How safe is your
data currently?

10. Service layers
People
Organisation
Client device
Interconnecting
network
JANET Cloud
Software-aaS
Software
Application software
Infrastructure
Platform
Platform-aaS
software
Operating system
Infrastructure-aaS
Infrastructure
Virtulisation
Servers
Networking &
Firewalling
Data centre

11. Brokerage
• Guiding themes
– Enabling re-use/re-sale of existing provision & capacity
– Identifying new models and opportunities
– Supporting adoption of new technologies & models
– Supporting organisations and keeping autonomy with institutions
– Promoting interoperability, open standards and data formats
– De-risking new models and services (SLA’s, T&Cs, governance)
– Creating an effective competitive market for suppliers
– Enabling new projects, developments, and shared services

12. Identify Pilots
Timescales Anticipated Service
Start
Create Prototype Projects Prove
Deliver wider scale
(with Commercial Suppliers) concepts
Build Prototypes
Migrate Prototypes (to service)
(with sector organisations)
Create
Environment
Build Digital Marketplace
Diligence on existing areas Diligence on new areas
Build Sustainability Model
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May …

13. Seeking Pilot Sites
• Looking for universities / colleges that:
– Are looking to develop/move their data centres
– Have already adopted off campus data centre / cloud services
– Are looking to adopt campus data centre / cloud type services
– Are looking to provide campus data centre / cloud services
– Are negotiating with commercial providers on campus data
centre / cloud services

14. Conclusions
• There are opportunities for significant cost and efficiency
savings to be made
• The risks need to be understood in context of the service
being purchased and need to be set in the context of the
risks to existing services