UC Davis is actively pursuing the use of cloud and cloud-like services. Starting with Gmail for Students in 2008, we then migrated our on-campus Sakai learning and collaboration system to an off-campus software-as-a-service (SaaS) in 2009. With a very successful on-campus virtualization service in place, we are looking at ways to transparently provide additional virtualization through cloud services provisioned via external partnerships. New budget pressures have led the campus to launch a new Shared Services Center strategy that moves major, but routine, components of critical campus services in Finance, HR, and IT into a common service center; this strategy in turn positions the campus for other cloud and SaaS opportunities as we realign campus expectations and investments. But the cloud isn't always the right answer, and understanding the challenges is half the fun. From this ferment, a coherent "cloud and earth" strategy is starting to develop, which brings together a variety of service models.
