Using cloud computing to foster closer links between higher education institutions 1
2
Lígia M. Ribeiro , Luís Valente 1
Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Engenharia, R. Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal,
[email protected] 2 Universidade do Porto, Reitoria, Praça Gomes Teixeira, 4099-002 Porto, Portugal,
[email protected] Keywords Cloud computing, federations, interoperability platforms, electronic administration, student mobility.
1. Summary The main objective of this work is to present the aims and the preliminary results of an ongoing project between four higher education institutions in Portugal. The project short title is “IES+Perto” which means “higher education institutions closer”. This project began in January 2011 and will run until September 2015. The total investment of the project is 2 million euros, corresponding to 1.7 million of funding. The consortium of the three universities of Porto, Aveiro and Coimbra, and the Polytechnic Institute of Porto proposed to set advanced and useful services to the community, exploring the benefits of interoperability, open standards and cloud computing, to help bring around a development strategy for administrative modernization and rationalization of costs in the higher education context.
2. INTRODUCTION Over the last few years the Portuguese higher education institutions (HEI’s) have managed to maintain high quality operating standards and have followed international best practices in order to achieve better levels of effectiveness, efficiency and quality. In respect to the information and communication technological context (ICT) this attitude has been very evident, especially the involvement of Portuguese HEI’s in several innovative projects that have sought the answer to an equation not always easy to solve: achieve greater rationalization and cost reduction in ICT, grounded on a strategic long-term vision related to excellence in scientific research, technological innovation and higher education qualifications. However, apart from some projects led in the past by the National Foundation for Scientific Computation, i.e. the Portuguese NREN (National Research and Education Network), as the Wi-Fi (eduroam) and the authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI) projects (http://www.fccn.pt/en/services), other joint projects led by the HEI’s themselves for shared ICT services and resources are rare. The “IES+Perto” project (http://iesmaisperto.up.pt/) aims to take advantage of the cloud computing information technology model to change this paradigm, increasing HEI’s confidence in using cloud infrastructures securely and fostering the adoption of cloud based services, facilitating the creation of new sustained processes of administrative modernization and offering new services to the academic community, in particular for supporting student mobility and for enhancing the communication and exploitation of academic information through mobile devices.
3. INTEOPERABILITY PLATFORM Following some investments on the existing data centers of the participating institutions to transform them into certified cloud-like architectures (Sousa, José António, Correia, Fernando, Bernardes, Mário, Martins, 2014), an aggregated cloud architecture (Moreno-Vozmediano, Montero, & Llorente, 2012) is presently under construction. This architecture will support an interoperability platform (PI) also under development (see Figure 1). Through the PI the acquisition and the
exchange of data from and between the participating HEI’s information systems (IS), as well as the provision of data to other applications, e.g. the mobile client applications, will be possible.
Figure 1 - Interoperability platform
It is required that each HEI has an identity provider (Shibboleth IdP), an authorization service, e.g. OAuth, to authorize the access of the PI to the HEI's web services and the web services applications. Consider for example the interface relating to mobile devices. This interface aims to virtualize and adapt for mobile devices the reception desks of the HEI's, in what respects to services, taking advantage of the interoperability middleware layer through which the communication and the access to information contained on the HEI's information systems will be processed.
4. CONCLUSION In this work we will present the main objectives and some preliminary results of the project “IES+Perto” - Higher Education Institutions Closer, a Portuguese project involving four HEI’s, the Universities of Porto, Aveiro and Coimbra, and the Polytechnic Institute of Porto. The project was financed by the Administrative Modernization Support System (SAMA) of the Operational Program Competitiveness Factors, COMPETE, under the National Strategic Reference Framework (QREN) and the European Union (EU). In the context of this project the four HEI’s scaled out their local existing data centers creating a larger virtual infrastructure and put up an interoperability platform for providing shared services, including the support for joint courses and national student mobility programs, as well as a technology solution for backing the development of API’s to communicate and explore academic information through mobile devices. This work will focus the interoperability platform and the services implemented over it. In terms of future perspectives, it is expected that the results of this project may drive a greater sharing of resources and ICT services between HEIs, taking advantage of virtualization and cloud computing.
5. REFERENCES Moreno-Vozmediano, R., Montero, R. S., & Llorente, I. M. (2012). Iaas cloud architecture: From virtualized datacenters to federated cloud infrastructures. Computer, 45(December), 65–72. doi:10.1109/MC.2012.76 Sousa, José António, Correia, Fernando, Bernardes, Mário, Martins, R. (2014). “IES+Perto” Project Cloud Computing. Retrieved February 24, 2015, from http://iesmaisperto.up.pt/wpcontent/uploads/2014/09/IES_mais_PERTO_IBERGRID2014_WS.pdf
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AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES Lígia Maria Ribeiro is Principal Researcher at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto since 2002. She was pro-rector at the University of Porto between 2006 and 2014, being responsible for ICT. She was vice-president of the Institute for Common Resources and Initiatives of the same University between 2003 and 2006 and director of the Computer Centre of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto between 1997 and 2002.
Lígia Maria Ribeiro received her degree in Applied Mathematics in 1977 at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto and holds a PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Minho. Her main research areas of interest are Computer Simulation, High Performance Computing, Information Systems, Electronic Administration and Informal Learning Spaces. She was President of EUNIS between 2004 and 2006, after being vice-president for two years. She is presently member of the EUNIS Board of Directors. She was also member of the Technical Committee of TERENA between 2008 and 2011. Since 2014 she is a member of the Task Group Best Practice/DRIS of euroCRIS. She is author or co-author of more than 70 publications and was responsible of 11 financed projects. She was also responsible for several University of Porto projects, specifically the information system, SIGARRA, the institutional repository, the grid project and the e-learning cafés project. In relation with the information system SIGARRA she received two awards, the Descartes 1998 award and the EUNIS Elite award in 2000, and in the e-learning field she received the Jens Dørup ELearning award in 2013. pt.linkedin.com/in/ligiamribeiro Luís M. Valente has an MsC in Network and Information Systems Engineering and is currently work in implementation of Electronic Administration projects, integrated in Digital University of the University of Porto and a researcher in the field of computer security at the CRACS/INESC-LA Port. Working straight in the U.PORTO Campus Card Project, his main assignment is the implementation of cryptographic functionalities, especially for secure authentication and digital signing. Since November 2014 is a ISO 27001 Lead Auditor certified by PECB.
