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SWITCH sounds out the data cloud for Swiss researchers

All over the world, cloud technologies have heralded in a new era in the IT universe, and there's no stopping it now. SWITCH is investigating what future prospects standardised cloud solutions might be able to offer Swiss researchers through its project "Cloud Computing".

What is cloud computing?
Put briefly, companies can use cloud computing to outsource any desired parts of their own IT infrastructure, such as virtualised servers, server capacities or services. These resources are then no longer stored locally but with the particular cloud provider, and the latter is responsible for security, operations and updating all at once. Owners have flexible access to their IT resources at any time via a web interface – to call up computing capacity as needed, to absorb internal load peaks or to make more efficient use of rarely needed applications.

Expertise for the scientific community
Along with Swiss researchers, SWITCH is testing the development of its own cloud-on-demand infrastructure, which is to be designed entirely to meet the needs of the research world. The pilot project involves building up both the required expertise and the technical components. The primarily aim, however, is to investigate the extent to which this cloud infrastructure could be meaningfully used within the Swiss education and research network.