Technology Services to Support Academic Research using AWS Institutional Framework

Students, educators, and researchers are key drivers of technological innovation. Cloud computing platforms provide researchers with efficient, elastic, reliable and on-demand resources to help with their research and innovation efforts. As a means to provide a technology service to support research, this project enabled relevant Cal State Northbridge campus stakeholders to easily build out their research or teaching endeavors in the cloud and innovate quickly, within an institutional framework governed by terms and conditions signed at an institutional level.

The grant funding provided consulting to create an institutional AWS framework to allow Cal State Northbridge researchers to provision AWS services utilizing the recent CSU AWS contract. This framework included an online web portal with easy to use streamlined functionality for AWS account creation and configuration, with AWS account billing back to a department or a research grant.

This CSUN-AWS framework could also serve as a case study for other CSU campuses who wish to setup similar AWS services for their research faculty. At the conclusion of this grant, CSUN shared the results of the implementation via a recorded webinar that described the AWS framework and web portal, offered suggestions and lessons learned for other campuses on how to get started, and identified opportunities for future collaboration across multiple CSU campuses regarding AWS support for academic research.

Principal Investigator

Ranjit Philip, Cal State Northbridge

Grant Cycle

Spring 2017