Scalable Cloud Strategies: Values for Higher Education

• 10/14/24

So, for example, in space science research, or physics, or astrophysics, if researchers are studying very complex problems with massive amounts of data and are analyzing something, it will probably require a supercomputer, right? But the psychologist who has two terabytes of brain mapping data and is trying to analyze something related to, let's say, a cognitive disorder… Maybe that can be optimally run in a much less expensive way with research computing on demand from one of the public cloud providers. I think there is absolutely a case to be made for that.

Every discipline, every faculty member, every postdoc doesn't need a supercomputer to resolve challenging questions. This is a huge market for AWS, Microsoft, and Google. And there's clearly a lot of competition among those three providers to make sure researchers are aware of new opportunities in their cloud environments. And I think this is really important and it's only going to help advance research collaborations and human knowledge.

Grush: Now I'd like to talk about smaller institutions. We hear about data integration and cloud strategies at very large institutions… and the story of the CSUs is amazing. But what would the values of scalable cloud strategies be at a smaller institution?

Wessells: I think that smaller institutions can absolutely benefit from a cloud strategy for reducing technical debt from their data centers. Diminishing the scope of capital investment in data centers is going to be critically important, especially for smaller institutions struggling to contain costs and attract new students.

Diminishing the scope of capital investment in data centers is going to be critically important, especially for smaller institutions struggling to contain costs and attract new students.

There are so many small liberal arts institutions that are trying to provide superb services to their students; IT services, both academic and administrative services. Rather than making recurring capital investments in data centers, they should absolutely consider making a shift to the cloud, to be much more nimble. Additionally, building in financial guardrails to optimize cloud spend with a modern FinOps solution is essential. And at smaller institutions, if you can't afford the IT staffing, you could find a trusted service provider that helps you in managing those environments.

I really worry about the smaller institutions, particularly the small liberal arts institutions that have made this country so special — schools where you can get a rich and well-rounded education. Yet the cost of IT and delivering core academic education and all the associated services to the students is very expensive. Trying to find ways to contain those costs is going to be critical. The way I see doing that at this point is to get that data center diminished in size and scale, and shift to a very well-managed cloud solution that leverages FinOps and cloud operations so that they are super-efficient with the resources in the cloud. That's it. Otherwise, we're going to see some institutions close.

Grush: But with just the fact that they may look at a scalable cloud strategy — wouldn't that help because they may have the option to grow more slowly or quickly?

Wessells: Yes, certainly the ability to take advantage of elasticity and scale for compute and storage and things like that in the cloud is much more responsive than going out to buy storage and compute resources, and dropping those into the data center, locking in capital debt and losing the ability to scale quickly.

An institution may choose one of our public cloud providers — Google, AWS, Azure — for appropriately scaled services. If the institution does not have the IT staff to do it, I strongly suggest the use of a managed service provider to do the managed services to make that transition. Peer institutions may be ready to share their experiences, as well.

Regardless of the size of your university or college, it's always prudent to plan carefully to execute a cloud transformation with the goal of achieving the rich benefits of scalable cloud services.

[Editor's note: Image created with AI — Microsoft Image Creator by Designer.]