When you choose to “move to the cloud,” it means that the IT infrastructure is stored offsite, at a datacenter that is maintained by the cloud computing provider. The cloud provider has the responsibility for managing the IT infrastructure, integrating applications, and developing new capabilities and functionality to keep pace with user demands.

For users, cloud computing offers more agility, scale, and flexibility. Instead of spending money and resources on legacy IT systems, users are able to focus on more strategic tasks. Without making a large upfront investment, they can quickly access the computing resources they need.

Research Computing Group can provide SFU researchers with access to SFU Cloud and Digital Research Alliance of Canada resources.

SFU Cloud

SFU Cloud is a private cloud service hosted in the SFU datacenter that provides on-demand secure and resizable computer infrastructure to support teaching, learning, research, and university operations.

Its simple web service interface, available from on campus networks, allows for remote acquisition and configuration of computing resources. SFU Cloud provides complete control of the computing resources that are hosted securely on-premise in the SFU datacenter.

SFU Cloud allows for rapid provisioning of new servers and reduces this process to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, to accommodate dynamically changing computing requirements.

For more information on SFU Cloud, please click here

Federation Cloud

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada provides cloud services are provided by the host sites that are part of the federation. Cedar Cloud is one such cloud service. In addition to its existing support for large-scale research projects, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada cloud computing assets are also capable of sustaining robust research from smaller-scale basic virtual machine hosting, to large scale research portals and other data intensive projects.

For more information about accessing Digital Research Alliance of Canada cloud researchers please click here