02
April
2025
Creating a Cloud Community Built to Last: A Conversation with Cloud Superhero Oren Sreebny
By Apryl Motley, CAE – Communications & Technical Writing Consultant
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Cloud Superhero Spotlight
Editor’s Note: This conversation continues our series of interviews spotlighting the wonderful contributions that research and higher ed community members make to the NET+ Program.
Be on the lookout for additional interviews throughout the year, and email Apryl Motley if there’s a Cloud Superhero you would like us to spotlight in the future. We’re grateful for all our volunteers and appreciate all they do to move our work forward.
— Sean O’Brien – Associate Vice President, NET+, Internet2
Ever wonder how the collective conversation about the cloud in research and education (R&E) got started? Internet2 senior cloud consultant Oren Sreebny is a good person to ask. From planning the Higher Education Cloud Forum to negotiating agreements with Amazon and Google, he’s been there since the beginning helping to build an engaged R&E cloud community. “I was involved with getting the whole community up and running,” he recalled. “Helping to build a sense of community is one of the things that I’m most proud of, and one of the things that I enjoy most about the work that I do.”
Oren’s career highlights include serving as executive director of strategic initiatives at the University of Washington before becoming senior director for emerging technologies and communications at the University of Chicago. “At that point in my life, I was a fairly pronounced cloud evangelist,” he said of his tenure at UChicago. In fact, during his time there, Oren became deeply involved in working with the Internet2 NET+ team on an Amazon Web Services agreement.
Seven years ago when he retired from UChicago, he reconnected with the team as a consultant for the NET+ Google Cloud Program and subsequently authored two briefing papers about cloud storage. As he explained, “I got plugged back in with Internet2 as a consultant and have been doing that ever since.” Oren continues to lend his experience and expertise to building a vibrant R&E cloud community. Here’s his take on why that’s been – and will continue to be – important.
The NET+ Effect
Coming together as a community through the Internet2 NET+ Program helped R&E institutions navigate the early stages of implementing cloud services.
Fun Facts About Oren
What He Likes Most About His Job: What I like most about my job is interacting with the people I get to interact with, my colleagues at Internet2, who are a wonderfully talented and warm group of people to spend time with, as well as getting to work with folks from various institutions.
Best Advice About the Cloud He Ever Received: I worked with a bunch of people at both the University of Washington and at the University of Chicago who cautioned me to be a little wary of the cloud services providers and their motivations, and to question their level of real commitment to higher ed and research as a sector. I mostly ignored that advice for a long time. We should continue to work with those companies and try to help them understand what it is we do and why it’s important. We should continue to take advantage of the services they offer where it makes sense for us to do so. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the cloud is not a one size fits all panacea for higher ed IT and research computing. So you know the best advice, as usual, sometimes the least heard advice.
“It was a lengthy and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately successful, endeavor to get an agreement signed with AWS,” Oren recalled. “Coming out of that, I served as the first chair of the AWS Service Advisory Board.”
“It was obvious that cloud was going to be a big deal,” he continued, “and if we had any hope of trying to engage with cloud service providers in a way that worked for our institutions, we would be better off doing it together than each institution approaching it individually.”
In addition to his work on the AWS agreement, Oren’s involvement with the NET+ program goes back to the beginnings of what today is Google Workspace for Education.
“When Google Workspace first came out, I was at the University of Washington, and we started trying to negotiate an agreement with Google on our own,” he recalled. “We did, and every other institution was doing the same thing. It just didn’t scale. We were all running around asking each other what did they tell you or here’s what I heard.”
“When NET+ got started, it really helped bring some sanity to those processes and gave us a way to express our concerns as a community to make sure they were being addressed by the service providers,” Oren continued. “It’s never easy to get those agreements ironed out amongst a lot of different institutions that may have very different concerns, but it’s so much better than every institution trying to do it on their own.”
According to Oren, those detailed negotiations were a real eye opener for higher ed procurement offices that didn’t really work with providers the size of Google and Amazon. “By banding together as NET+, we created a more unified voice to speak with them,” he said, “to at least have some hope of having a loud enough voice that we could be heard.”
Promise and Pitfalls
Speaking with one voice makes it more feasible for R&E institutions to maximize opportunities in the cloud. “The cloud presents a tremendous opportunity for research and education because it lowers the barriers that occur between having an idea and being able to implement an idea,” Oren observed.
According to him, along with that opportunity comes some warnings. “It’s very easy to get started, but it’s not so easy to turn that idea into something that will stand the test of time live in production,” he said. “Also, it can be extremely easy to spend huge amounts of money without knowing that you’re about to do so and get yourself in real real hot water that way. Every opportunity comes with its pitfalls.”
The best way to avoid those pitfalls? Building your team’s expertise and experience with the cloud is a good start. “To the extent that institutions have experts who could help people with the cloud, taking advantage of that expertise is really key,” Oren explained. “It can be very useful to build up that expertise whether that’s in their central computing organization, their research office, or in people’s departments.”
“Being able to go to someone and say, I’ve got this research idea and have your colleagues say, let’s do that on the cloud. We’ll help you get that started and monitor the spending,” he continued. “Or to say, oh, no, you don’t have to do that in a cloud. We have something in our data center that’s already there for you to use. Being able to have those conversations with people who know the landscape of both cloud and what’s available locally is key, particularly for researchers.”
Commitment to Community
Keeping the collective conversation going about cloud services is just as important now as it was in the past. “Being a part of the community around not just cloud, but higher ed, was a key part of my professional life in terms of getting a sense of what people were doing at other institutions and being able to bring that back to my own institution” Oren said.”This was really key to making some progress at the institutions I worked at over the years.”
“When we first started, it was about demonstrating that the cloud had value in higher ed and research,” he continued. “We’re beyond that now. Now, the question is how do we use the cloud in a way that works the best for us as a community. We can certainly continue to do that better as a community than we can as individual institutions. So, the flavor changes, but the need is just as great.”
Cloud Community Milestone
April marks the 10th anniversary of “Cloud Strategy for Higher Education: Building a Common Solution” (opens in a new window) being published by the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research. This impetus for publishing this seminal working paper came from a July 2014 CSG Cloud Strategy Working Group workshop in Chicago coordinated by Oren and Mike Chapple at University of Notre Dame. As Oren observed, “I believe it was the first occasion that technologists from multiple higher ed institutions spent serious time delving into the nitty gritty details of how to architect the implementation of cloud infrastructure specifically for higher education institutions.”