University of St Andrews keeps 'key intellectual property' in-house even as it moves more to the cloud

CIO Steven Watt keeps university IP close while strategically moving services and infrastructure to the cloud

University of St Andrews CIO Steven Watt has told Computing that the organisation has shifted more and more services into the cloud, as providers' services have improved - but keeps "key intellectual property" in the university's recently consolidated data centre.

Watt, who will be a panellist at next week's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit, also said that the university plans to strike a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other similar services that will enable departments conducting research to tap into extra capacity in the cloud should they need extra resources from compute-intensive research.

"At the moment, the things we want to keep in-house are key intellectual property, I guess, in terms of our student record system, our finance system, the data that people generate through research - most of that will still sit on-premise because I don't think the market is mature enough, or the offerings aren't there to provide SaaS or IaaS platforms for such things at the moment," said Watt.

He continued: "We've got a contract in place to enable us to use cloud, if the need arises, but that's largely in the research space rather than the core systems. But we are looking at that at the moment, providing that agility and elasticity by being able to tap into those cloud services."

Cloud deals will come at the same time that the university is continuing to consolidate its data centre resources into two locations in the historic town on Scotland's east coast. These developments contrast strikingly with the sprawling IT estate that Watt inherited when he joined in 2010, when the University was running as many as seven different email systems as departments did their own thing.

Now, having aggressively consolidated the university's data centre infrastructure, Watt is looking to make sure that it's also resilient. "Over the next one to two years, we're looking at putting in place another data centre on the other end of the town, from a disaster recovery and resilience perspective, for our core business systems and research data," Watt told Computing.

He continued: "We're also going through a period of further server and application rationalisation, trying to consolidate servers and storage down further, and to retire a lot more of the legacy apps that any 603 year-old organisation will have acquired quite a few of.

"The other thing that we're doing is a classic case of 'right sizing' or looking again at all of our software and hardware assets, and deciding at an application level what could go out into the cloud, what we need to keep on-premise, and what needs to be a hybrid solution.

"We're going through everything from top to bottom, all the systems, and asking, 'do we really need to host this on-site, or is it something for which the cloud is now mature enough to deliver the service for us?'"

The university is also poised to start work on a biomass power-generation plant, while plans to build a wind-farm close to the town have also been approved. Together with the installation of photo-voltaic solar panels, Watt hopes to make the university's IT function carbon-neutral, if not during 2016, then in the very near future.

"We were re-accredited for the Certified Energy Efficient Data Centre (CEEDA) in September 2014. Plus, we have made progress with our biomass energy centre. We have also achieved 'participant status' with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, helping drive further efficiencies and frameworks for doing so," said Watt.

Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit on 23 September will cover public sector and other organisations' data centre and cloud strategies. Registration is FREE to qualifying end uers. See the agenda and register here before places run out.