Does your research belong in the cloud?

Last updated: August 16, 2022

If your current research computing environment is costing you time, straining your budget, or giving you headaches, you may want to consider cloud computing, which offers a versatile and powerful platform for research computing. Whether you choose to explore Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or another alternative, UW-IT can help you understand the costs and benefits of the cloud.

Top reasons for moving research to the cloud

  • Cost effective for many types of computing, with costs continuing to decrease over time
  • Extremely secure
  • Provides virtually  unlimited resources for computation, storage, networking and data management
  • Offers a rapidly growing number and variety of add-on services
  • Is built on familiar computing machinery, operating systems, software environments and applications (Linux, Windows, Python, R, MATLAB)
  • Eliminates the need to buy, manage, and maintain computer equipment
  • Means no more queueing up for compute resources to become available
  • Offers elasticity—you can “scale up” instantly whenever the workload increases to meet demand, and scale down when the load decreases to save money
  • You only pay for the time you actually use; and can shut down resources when you aren’t actively using them.

Moving your research to the cloud

UW-IT can consult with you to help you understand what is involved in moving your research computing to the cloud. While cloud computing is relatively new, it has quickly become recognized as an empowering technology that is being widely adopted across many research domains.

If you are interested in the cloud—or not fully satisfied with your current computing solution—UW-IT can help you build a model of how a cloud implementation would work for your research, and what it will cost you in time and money.

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