UC Riverside turns to cloud to supercharge scientific research

A partnership and cloud training model

With roughly 180 staff members, UC Riverside IT is relatively small, with largely traditional on-premises IT skills. As such, migrating to the cloud alone was not part of Gunkel’s plan.

Google’s assistance in developing a more efficient cloud architecture and training UCR’s IT staff in cloud technologies has been an immeasurably valuable service, he says, adding that Google is in a support role and is not running the show. UCR’s cloud architecture, for example, has been designed to be location-agnostic so the university is not locked into any one vendor and can adopt a multicloud platform over the long term.

“The services engagement is consulting and training to assist us in moving initial cloud workloads and to assist in our architecture to align to GCP services,” Gunkel says. “This is a ‘teach us to fish’ model. It’s all our work.”

UC Riverside IT is well on its way to migrating its core data to the cloud, developing its research platform, and shifting a range of applications to support the needs of its user base, which ranges from quantum engineering researchers to administrators, faculty, and students.

To date, UCR has moved the “vast majority of our data stores to Google,” Gunkel says, noting that his staff is currently refining the architecture and ETL processes for management and organization of the data long term.

In addition, UC Riverside IT is aligning its data to be accessed from Looker, Google’s enterprise BI and analytics platform, though which UCR will be deploying its Oracle Finance application for scaled reporting. UC Riverside is also rewriting a number of legacy applications to be cloud-native while revamping others for the cloud — there will be no ‘lift and shift’ of any applications, Gunkel says.