EDUCAUSE Live! Webinar
Movin' On Up: Planning for Moving Academic Libraries' Infrastructure to the Cloud

As a part of a consortia of universities exploring a comprehensive cloud strategy for academia, the University of Notre Dame co-authored the "Cloud Strategy for Higher Education" white paper in November 2014. Since then, Notre Dame's Office of Information Technology (OIT) has devised a "cloud first" strategy to move 80 percent of its technical infrastructure into the cloud by the end of 2017. As a campus technology partner, the Hesburgh Libraries is planning how to align our technological infrastructure with the central IT plan. Putting infrastructure into the cloud represents a radical change in mindset for technology planning, shifting thinking about technology from assets that need replacement every five to seven years to thinking about IT as a monthly utility/service. This presentation will cover the Hesburgh Libraries' plan to move a significant amount of our infrastructure into the cloud and the phases devised to meet the OIT's three-year plan. The presentation will include background on the university's decision to move infrastructure to the cloud, our experimentation in Amazon Web Services (AWS), the assessment of the library service catalog and the determination of which hosting model meets the needs of our services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, or On-Premises), and budget, migration, and roll-out considerations that libraries may need to evaluate in this process.