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Multicloud environments – and the challenges they pose – are common in the research and education community.
EdTech: Focus on Higher Education recently interviewed Sean O’Brien, associate vice president for NET+ Cloud Services at Internet2, as well as IT leaders at three universities across the U.S. about multicloud adoption. The discussion included shared challenges and best practices to address them.
“Most institutions of higher education are multicloud,” O’Brien said. “We did a survey in the Higher Education Cloud Forum, and 81 percent of institutions reported that they were multicloud, with meaningful investments in two or more clouds.”
One of the challenges O’Brien highlighted was on the workforce front, ensuring an institution has the staff skills and talent needed to support multiple clouds. “The cloud vendors have certifications, or ways for IT staff to demonstrate competency in a cloud environment. That’s a starting point. The major cloud providers are a really good resource for cloud-specific training, but there is a gap in that multicloud or cloud-neutral training piece. I would always encourage people to start in a vendor-neutral place.”
Internet2’s CLASS program is one example of vendor-neutral training aimed at filling that gap. CLASS is designed to accelerate cloud computing adoption in research and higher education, offering hands-on experiential learning and a growing community of practice to support workforce development.
Read the story in EdTech, Multicloud Adoption Takes Hold in Higher Education
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