UK's University of Manchester has its head in all the clouds as it rains £50m on integrators University of Manchester has dished out a contract worth up to £50m to a handful of integrators to provision cloud services from the big three providers and build a tool for "consolidated and managed billing". In a framework agreement, the uni - based in the north west of England - said it aims to ease the procurement of AWS, …
Ok so I'm old enough to remember VAX and I still know the ESC codes for an RM380Z
But isn't the whole point of a cloud service that it's all done for you?
You pay Microsoft $$$$ and office365 does everything, the only extra cost being the alcohol and pyschotherapy if you have to use Sharepoint
Why do you have to $$$M for somebody to organise using cloud services ?
> Why do you have to $$$M for somebody to organise using cloud services ?
Because otherwise you have to trust your in-house staff to know what they're doing and you couldn't possibly do that. Everyone knows you only get decent staff by paying 10x the amount to an outsourced provider.
Have you met most university IT departments? Most of them are shockingly bad. Not that those contractors are much better they'll likely find the cheapest staff on the payroll and send them on an intensive *insert cloud provider* course and they'll get the rest using *search engine of choice*
If you think that PhDs are just a way to get more researchers, then there is a huge over-production of PhDs in progress, and always has been. In truth not every PhD graduate will make a good researcher, and fewer still can stand the poor wages and itinerant lifestyle of a pos-doc researcher. The majority of PhDs do that degree, take a look at the job market and head off somewhere else.
It is also a mistake to think of PhDs as super-intelligent rare individuals. Gaining a PhD takes some brains, but most of the skillset is thinking on your feet and sheer, bloody-minded persistence in the face of repeated set-backs. These make for fairly decent IT techies.
One of the first to have one, I believe. (Before that it was a spin-off of the Math department.) They used to have their own computers which provided service for the rest of the university.
Obviously things have changed a bit since the days of a couple of CDC7600s front ended by ICL1900 series but one might be forgiven for thinking that they'd have been at the front of the pack when it came to developing the software components for cloud computing. Put it another way, I'd expect some outfit like the government to be issuing a contract 'worth up to 50 million' to a component of the university to provide those services either directly or indirectly.
A triple cloud deployment is a recipe for disaster - force the precious professors & researchers to use 1 or at least bring it down to 2. Using all 3 is luxury they shouldn't have.
$50m for a triplicate set of VPC's and rules plus a billing monitoring tool is a total waste of Students and Tax payers money, when infrastructure discipline is free (less the arguments).
They already have (likely more than) a triple deployment, and the pain of moving away from that probably isn't worth it.
Prof/groups traditionally have almost total freedom in how they spend their grant money of course. There's plenty of places where that leads to duplication/waste.
The goal here is simply to make sure they at least get University level bulk buyer rates when they do by cloud stuff. Worth doing.
I studied as a postgrad at University of Manchester a couple of years back. They had disabled locking on all their workstations by group policy, then had the audacity to put posters up around the building telling people to lock their computers when they were away from them! They also didn't redirect profiles, so you had to use the same computer as last time if you wanted your files to be in the right place, which was difficult when the library is rammed full of students and you're lucky if you can even get on a workstation.
My conclusion is that the IT dept at UoM can do one.
The locking of all student workstations was disabled because students would reserve workstations all day. They would lock the workstation, go for a spot of lunch and then pop back to unlock the workstation. Not very fair to other users, especially when places were rammed full as you stated.
Staff workstations have never had locking disabled. Infact locking is automatic after 15 minutes inactivity. I suspect the posters you saw were aimed at staff for data protection pruposes.
Lastly folder redirection has been in place for both staff and students for the last 10 years, and also both had a home directory that is automatically mounted at logon, so not sure what you mean here. There isn't roaming profiles, because it is hard to limit users (1000's) from constantly running out of space, and a pain to administer constant roaming profile exceptions.
So I think "the IT dept at UoM can do one" is a little harsh.
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