The Cyberinfrastructure Plan
What is a Cyberinfrastructure Plan?
A Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Plan is a strategic document that articulates how proposed CI improvements are conceived, designed, and implemented in the context of a coherent organization-wide strategy and approach to scalable information technology for research and research education.
A Process for Mission-Aligned Cyberinfrastructure
Your organization’s CI plan can be an important tool for aligning and informing campus stakeholders as part of your organization’s strategic planning processes for mission-aligned information technology.
A CI Plan has historically been a required document or product for certain federal funding programs, including the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program.
FAQ
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The NSF defines Cyberinfrastructure (CI) as the “…the hardware, software, networks, data and people that underpin today’s advanced computing technology…” – https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/cyberinfrastructure.
We define Cyberinfrastructure as the IT resources for computational and data-intensive scholarship, at-scale, encompassing:
- data storage, collaboration, and security
- networking and data movement
- computing interfaces, environments, and capacity
- technologies for developing and implementing research software
- human capacity to deliver and capitalize on the above
Cyberinfrastructure may also be referred to as “Research IT” or “Research Computing and Data (RCD)” depending on the context and audience, and tends to require more specialized solutions that differ from generalizable “enterprise” IT solutions.
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- AI and Data Science research skills are increasingly applicable across scholarly domains, sectors, and degree levels.
- Research education (the teaching of research methods in the classroom) needs the same research IT infrastructure.
- Research and graduate research education are defining and significant components of university scholarship.
- Cyberinfrastructure and the aspects above are, thus, critical for faculty and student recruitment, societal impact, and external funding.
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A CI Plan captures your current state and near-term plans – it’s an important first step in a strategic planning journey. A CI Plan may be appropriate for public audiences, including:
- faculty candidates
- grant reviewers and program officers for certain funding programs
- facilities documents for grants
A CI Strategic plan is a more comprehensive plan for CI investment and is an extensive effort to produce and execute. Eventually, you may want to maintain a longer campus-facing version and extract a 5-page proposal-ready CI Plan from it.
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CI Plan |
CI Strategic Plan |
| Objective |
Capture existing CI to demonstrate readiness for development and/or funding |
Guide planning, investment, and evolution of CI resources in support of campus research and research education |
| Focus |
Current networking, cybersecurity, IAM, compute and data, training/support, current funding |
Aspirational computing and data resources, infrastructure, training/support, governance/sustainability |
| Audience |
Faculty & Staff, Campus Leadership, Funding Agencies and Grant Reviewers |
Campus Leadership, Faculty & Staff, Partners |
| Time Horizon |
1-2 years |
2-5 years |
| Length |
3-5 pages |
10+ pages |
| Effort |
Modest-to-Moderate |
Significant |
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Components of a CI Plan
Based on prior NSF CC* solicitations, community examples, and our consultative work with campuses, we recommend that your CI Plan address the below major sections, reflected also in our community-informed CI Plan Template.
The order of sections is up to you and may vary depending on your specific purposes, audiences, and operational structure. Consider leading with your strengths, or with aspects relevant to your proposal or strategic goals. Some of the typically-included content items within each section may not apply to all campuses—adapt as appropriate for your institutional context. Include what your campus does have, even if it’s not very formalized or is distributed across units. Use the below checkboxes to help document your progress.
| Plan Components |
Details |
| Governance and Sustainability |
Note: Sustainability must be included in the CC* proposal body, but we recommend including it in a CI Plan intended for campus stakeholders.
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| Research and Education Drivers |
Note: This component is required within the CC* proposal body in the form of faculty- or unit-specific examples driving CI development or strategic planning, but we recommend including it in a stakeholder-facing CI Plan document. More generally, this section should be seen as the motivator for any investment or change.
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| Outreach, Facilitation and Training |
Note: For many campuses, this category of cyberinfrastructure might be distributed across units, or executed on an ad-hoc basis by IT staff, librarians, etc. Include such activities, even if not centrally executed or coordinated.
- How outreach, facilitation, support, and training are organized, funded, and/or coordinated across centralized and (any) unit-based entities (even if this is not-so-formalized).
- How faculty, students, and researchers are made aware of existing capabilities, with what extent of reach.
- How faculty access guidance/consulting services, user support, and extent of engagement/reach.
- Training opportunities available to faculty, students, and researchers and extent of engagement/reach.
- Support for faculty requests pertaining to research/data science software procurement and implementation beyond personal devices, standardized desktop applications, and standardized cloud-based services.
- How insights from outreach, facilitation, support, and training are incorporated into service design and governance.
- As applicable, note when specific capabilities have been implemented to support unique and/or significant research or education needs.
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| Core Infrastructure, Campus Network, and Information Security |
Note: Some of the core infrastructure details that are not of central importance to a CI Plan should be included in the Facilities Document. We recommend including it in a stakeholder-facing CI Plan in a separate section.
- Core infrastructure across datacenters and/or colocation, support for power, cooling, and physical security.
- Overview of general security approaches (e.g. campus-wide systems security practices).
- Overview of research data security approaches (e.g. special cases for units or systems with access-controlled research data, etc).
- Local backbone network capabilities, connections to buildings and labs, wireless support, network security and monitoring approach, (applicable) research networking optimizations (e.g. Science DMZ), and a network diagram, also demonstrating wide-area connections.
- Capacity and redundancy of (wide-area) connection(s) to local/metro area, regional network, and national network (e.g. via your REN/state system, etc.), and extent of collaboration.
- Already-planned/in-progress network expansions (if applicable), perhaps with updated network diagram.
- As applicable, note when specific capabilities have been implemented to support unique and/or significant research or education needs.
- Previous CC* solicitations include information about the following specific requirements (NSF 24-530):
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| Scalable Computing and Data Storage |
Note: For many campuses, this category of cyberinfrastructure might be distributed across units, executed on an ad-hoc basis by IT staff, or may mean that researchers and educators primarily lean on commercial options. Include any typical practices and types of services, even if not centrally executed or centrally funded.
- Campus-coordinated services used for research data storage and data management, including campus-executed and externally-executed resources for project-duration data storage, long-term archival, cloud services (e.g. AWS, Box, Google), software and tools for managing data movement/organization/access, etc.
- Campus-coordinated services for computing capacity beyond personal devices, including campus-executed and externally-executed resources for desktop capabilities (e.g. GIS labs), virtual machines, high-performance and/or high-throughput computing, cloud computing, federally-funded resources, etc.
- Include human support specific to the above (back-reference outreach, facilitation, and training section where appropriate).
- As applicable, note when specific capabilities have been implemented to support unique and/or significant research or education needs.
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| Strategic Outlook and Collaborative Opportunities |
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Developing a CI Plan
CI Planning is a communicative alignment process, gathering data and developing a campus CI Plan should:
- Involve, inform, and align key campus stakeholders
- Recognize stakeholder concerns
- Ensure stakeholder cooperation and buy-in
Development of a CI Plan is usually a shared project among IT units, campus and faculty leadership, and research administration. Consider leveraging Stakeholder Engagement tools like our suggested CI Plan Stakeholder Mapping template and example to guide your collaboration in CI Plan development.
Even though it should not require a large time investment to complete, it will help to begin this as early as possible. You will probably want to have discussions with various stakeholders partners, and you may need to build or strengthen the relationships with these folks to get the support you need from them. Relationships take time!
Get Started
- Examine CI Plan examples from institutions similar to yours:
- Leverage your connections to other campuses.
- Check out the examples in the Quick Links below, or contact us for pointers.
- Leverage existing institutional documents:
- Institutional strategic plans
- IT strategic plans
- Governance processes and documentation
- Research strategic plans (strategic efforts, focus areas, etc.)
- Use templates, adapting to your campus structure and needs (like those in the CI Plan “Starter Pack” below).
- Identify your “who to ask” list: For each section, determine:
- Who has the information you need?
- What existing documentation can you reference?
- What level of detail is appropriate for your campus and CI Plan purpose(s)?
Quick Links
Resources to help you develop your cyberinfrastructure plan.
The Internet2-generated materials linked herein have been heavily informed by the other resources, above, and through the support we’ve provided to campuses and regional initiatives in individual consulting and regional engagement, including Research Engagement team contributions to NSF-funded workshops associated with the Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (NSF #2137123, #2234326), the NV-DICE project (NSF #2346263), the The Quilt (NSF #2512847), as well as others in progress.