06.01. – Heads in the Clouds: Measuring the Implications of Universities Migrating to Public Clouds (Tobias Fiebig)

Ersteinmal ein frohes neues Jahr. Auch 2022 machen wir weiter mit
Flarp, den Anfang macht Tobias Fiebig mit Heads in the Clouds: Measuring the Implications of Universities Migrating to Public Clouds

Start ist wie immer pünktlich um 19:00:
https://vc5.cms.hu-berlin.de/b/mic-crd-f3x-vxs

Es wird auch wieder einen Aufzeichnung des Vortrags geben. Gerne dürft ihr auch Freunde / Bekannte / Kollegen einladen.

Abstract:

The digitalization of research and education is one of the central topics for the German education system. In that discussion, the current strategy is often considered as inert, delayed by privacy concerns, while a migration to large centralized cloud platforms (MS Teams, Zoom) is celebrated as an adequate tool to build a digital university.

In this talk we will inspect the digitalization of universities and their migrations to public clouds through the empirical lens of large-scale network measurements. Our measurements allow us to paint an accurate picture of the digitalization at German universities and the growing dependance on public clouds. On an international scale, we find a polarized situation, with university systems which made the step to depend on large-scale cloud providers years ago, while universities in other countries were able to mostly preserve their academic independence.

An interdisciplinary contextualization of our results reveals that Germany currently sits at a crossroad. We, as researchers and educators, have to ask ourselves which future of research and education we want. Do we—despite its apparent dangers—follow the international trend of cloud migrations, or do we instead decide to lead, and build a digital university of the future that preserves the independence of research and education?