€5500 per user per year.

Are any universities looking into cloud computing yet, i.e. AWS or Azure?

Rather than having to buy lot’s of extremely powerful workstations or servers there must be a cost benefit to pay-as-you-go cloud computing? Switching off the cloud servers when not in use, and whacking in more CPU/Memory when you need it sounds useful for the kinds of usage patterns that have been discussed on this thread?

It’s easy to see why cloud computing is catching on in companies where operational expenditure is fine but capital expense avoided – even if its not actually that much cheaper in the long run. Would that extend to education?

Lease v Buy is a capex / opex question, and usually down to the financial controllers preference from what I can see

Down to the finance cost versus other available cash and its cost – say the finance cost on the lease is 10%: if you’ve got oodles of cash in the bank and it’s earning 0.2% interest, then buy, if you’re running an overdraft that’s costing 15%, better to lease. The workings are a bit more complicated than that typically, but that’s the broad principle.

Looked into things like Amazon cloud and I think it has a future. One thing that needs to be addressed is where the data resides from a security POV. Most of the stuff we do ends up in the public domain but where research is based upon a ‘black box’ of IP from an industrial liason where the researcher has to know what it is but cannot disclose it. Some other software comes from places such as Los Alamos where they are a bit careful about where it goes.
In addition, an academic, when securing funds for a compute resource tend not to like to share it outside of their group. Often the jobs they run saturate the machines anyway so other tasks don’t get much of a look-in.

Are any universities looking into cloud computing yet, i.e. AWS or Azure?

Being reviewed at the moment. All students are on office 365 with unlimited storage in onedrive. Will probably look at onedrive for staff first before anything else.

Quite a different organisation, but 2bn EUR a year for about 100k people

Quite a different organisation, but 2bn EUR a year for about 100k people

Holly Molly ! 20K per person per year ?

We spend about £100M a year on 10K office and 73K store workers.

Any jobs going?