Immo Noack
SWITCH – Swiss NREN. Swiss universities are members. Core competencies: Network, security, and identity management. Around 45 universities in Switzerland.
Have local SWITCH services based in data centers in Zurich and Lausanne.
Buy IaaS through GEANT, which is the pan-European organization. The GEANT tender is not valid for Switzerland, but conditions apply. Three parts: Original IaaS providers (direct); original IaaS providers (indirect); Resellers for IaaS indirect providers. Providers are AWS and Microsoft.
SWITCH’s role is expanding its cloud offering with external suppliers, provided exclusively by SWITCH to Swiss higher ed. Data protection is a big concern – they don’t want data in the US. GDPR is coming next May.
Findings: universities are rather cautious, prefer to build their own resources (they still invest heavily in higher ed). Budget process is not prepared for cloud-usage; University IT units want to keep the existing stuff, but researchers who want the cloud.
Oren Sreebny 