The ICT Cloud service offers low cost virtual servers using enterprise class hardware in secured and redundant data centers. Using Cloud virtual servers can yield significant cost savings with numerous benefits and features.
Virtualization allows you to consolidate your infrastructure costs by only paying for what you need. Users of the service only get charged for virtual machines (VMs) which are powered on and running. If VMs are turned off then only storage costs are applied.
Customers can also adjust amount of resources they need for their VMs as they need it. Disk space, CPU, and memory can be added as it is used rather than all at once. This means that the cost only increases as needs do.
ICT has aggressively priced the service to cover only the costs of operating it, which ensures the savings are passed on to you and your organization.
ICT's cloud service operates compute and storage across two data centers on campus allowing for the cloud service to stretch across campus. This allows the infrastructure to tolerate both small and large failures, reducing downtime and increasing the reliability of your VMs.
Included as part of the cloud service are nightly backups for disaster recovery. The backup technology is designed for restoring VMs and in the case of disaster the cloud service is able to restore your VMs and data quickly reducing overall downtime.
The cloud service provides improved security of the cloud infrastructure and university data (uniform backups, physical access control to server rooms, automated patching and vulnerability scanning available).
Advanced customers are also able to deploy their own firewall edge appliances to further control access to their VMs and university data.
VMs are able to created quickly and easily, from both pre-built templates created by ICT or templates created by you the VM administrator.
VM administrators can also create, revert and remove VM snapshots, allowing increased agility for when you need it.
