CLOUD COMPUTING FOR LIBRARIES: AN INTRODUCTION

KRISTA GODFREY MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY KGODFREY@MUN.CA

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WHAT IS THE CLOUD?http://bit.ly/1NDpOri

pretty familiar nowapplications do not run on single computer but spread overdistributed cluster, using storage space and computing resourcesfrom many available machines as needed

adoption of cloud now common place - obligatory gartner hype cycle for emerging tech showing last year and thiscloud computing still in trough of disillusionment

now no longer an issue, all comfortable with it

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?bit.ly/HbOHVV

FROM PROCURING TO MANAGING TECH

- shift priorities from managing IT to service oriented goals

FEATURES

▸ ON-DEMAND SELF-SERVICE

▸ BROAD NETWORKING ACCESS

▸ RESOURCE POOLING

▸ RAPID ELASTICITY

▸ MEASURED SERVICE

http://bit.ly/1SFrQuU

- from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)- - on-demand demand self service - access when you want, get more when you need it easily- broad network access - need/use internet to access, use with any internet ready device- resource pooling - resources easily shared, adjust for peak times- rapid elasticity - automatically scale as needed. grows as you need it; great for pilot projects. start small, grow as required rather than overbuy for potential growth or refigure infrastructure when move to actual project- measured service - like electricity; pay for what you use- multi tenancy - one of the other terms often associated with cloud computing is multi-tenancy - single software instance that runs on a server, which many access. one instance of the software for an discovery layer that many libraries access, may be able to customize a little, but the main is one software

CLOUD TYPES

▸ PUBLIC

▸ PRIVATE

▸ COMMUNITY

▸ HYBRID

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- public most common, sign up and go- private 1 institution only- community specific community, shared interests/concerns - government is good ex. higher education might have. like minded people share, consortiums- hybrid combo of the others

CLOUD VARIATIONSbit.ly/1pAOp59

INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS)

- buying space/time on external servers. dealing with parts that are key to IT - servers, hardware, networking- staff prepared for high level of involvement

PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PAAS)

- existing sw platform to build your own applications on, uses provider’s infrastructure.

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS)

- most common- - sign up and go

WHAT DRIVES LIBRARIES TO OR FROM THE CLOUD?

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OUR PATRONS

- used to it, want it, expect it

GOALS

to provide best access, best service, reduce costs, campus or city initiative to consolidate services, etc

BUDGET

- cuts, need to make changes- can’t afford IT dept, so use the cloud to support services instead

PERSONNEL

- losing people, can’t replace (retirements, etc)- new skills needed

MOBILE DEVICES

- mobile devices thrive on the cloud

POLICIES & REGULATIONS

- major reason not to- provincial or state regulations may prohibit- privacy- data storage- legal is confusing to say the least

HOW ARE LIBRARIES USING THE CLOUD?

http://bit.ly/213GguY

INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS)

- amazon web services (EC2 - elastic compute cloud & S3 - simple storage service)- can use open source software on such services for digital archives, etc- requires most tech know how- closest to having servers on site

PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PASS)

- for developing, testing, deploying, updating, hosting services- google app engine- windows azure- heroku- some ILS

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS)

- most common- discovery layers (EDS, Primo, Summon)- ils- library services platforms (OCLC Worldshare, Ex Libris Alma, Proquest Intota)- citation managers- openurl resolvers- libguides- flickr- social media- stackmap

LIBRARY SERVICES

- discovery layers- LSP/URM (Alma, Worldshare)

- built from ground up - multitenant- allow for move to service oriented architecture, new agility to innovate & include new services

- cataloguing - LibraryThing, biblios, book where

REFERENCE & INSTRUCTION

- get out from ref desk- libguides- gforms, gdocs- poll everywhere- youtube, jing

MARKETING & OUTREACH

-social media

QUESTIONShttp://bit.ly/1l5yPSR

BENEFITS FOR LIBRARIES bit.ly/1pAQY7k

SHARING

- share metadata- share resources- share data

COLLABORATION

- save time- metadata- Haithi Trust- bX Recommender- LibraryCloud (Harvard library innovation lab)

SERVICE

- support- vendor side updates- in turn, focus on our own service rather than tech support

ACCESS

any time, any where

COST

no longer need to but servers that cost $1000s

SCALABILITY

- grows as you need it- good during exam times when servers often busy, offloads to other servers to continue service; ideally less downtime- great for projects - start a pilot with a cloud service. if successfully, easily transition to full service; adjust needs only when needed

INNOVATION

less time on maintenance = more time on innovation

DIGITIZATION

- less time on maintenance, more time for digitizing our unique collections- can use the cloud to build digital collections, with less cost and IT maintenance

ASSESSMENT

- new systems being built to make it easier to assess our collections- cloud is ideally about being open and sharing data- can compare our libraries with like libraries- build unique collections- save collections money- make sure we’re doing what our users need/want

GREEN

- potential to be better for environ- fewer servers eating up energy- bigger companies can set up more efficiently

ISSUES FOR LIBRARIEShttp://bit.ly/1lvuhFV

CHANGE

- new skills, new focus - service rather than IT- new workflows, give up old practices

SUPPORT

- being in a cloud means learning new things- support staff in learning- need to support users as learn new tools- need to deal with BYOD culture - how train our staff to handle questions or should they even support all devices?

COST

- move to subscription based, recurring fees rather than one time fees- features can cost more- customizations can cost more

CONTROL

- can’t do things when we want- reliant on others- customizations may be harder to implement

FORCED UPDATES

- can cause issues for any customizations we may make- usually sandbox to help with that but change is coming regardless

DATA OWNERSHIP

- a primary concern for libraries - ie. if sharing your metadata, do you retain it?

SECURITY

- usually better but can still be an issue- threats: data leaks, breaches, or loss; denial of service attacks, - risks: service termination/failure, data protection, etc

RELIABILITY

- nothing’s perfect- often part of an SLA (more soon)- issue can be with provider or with broadband provider- can be bought out by bigger companies or fail

PRIVACY

- number 1 concern of libraries and many patrons- library data must be kept private-needs of larger organization/institution/province/state/nation can affect if you can use cloud

TEXT

DO YOU TRUST YOUR DATA/INFO TO THE CLOUD

▸ A. Yes, I trust my data in the cloud

▸ B. Yes, I put some of my data in the cloud but I don’t really trust it

▸ C. No, I don’t trust the cloud at all

http://bit.ly/1MTMqYd

CLOUD CONSIDERATIONShttp://bit.ly/1LmSa7C

BUDGET

- often start free and then costs increase- customizations can cost- one time to subscription fee- cost of data storage- cost by number of users

PERSONNEL

- often used as an excuse to reduce IT - not necessary- may change but need someone who is well versed to deal with SLA, etc. IaaS still needs high level skills, just not on own

servers. security issues to deal with. it won’t run itself. integration with other systems. apis, etc- new set of skills to implement and manages complex cloud services, to see how systems relate, make them work together

TRAINING & SUPPORT

‣ realign jobs‣ support & training of byod

DIGITAL DIVIDE

- not gone yet

BANDWIDTH

- do you have bandwidth in area/institution to support a cloud service- what happens if it goes down?- we’re not at ubiquitous connectivity, not cheap enough, outages still happen. interruptions means loss of productivity

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS (SLA)

When looking at a cloud based service, consider the following‣ security (firewalls, web app protection, etc)‣ storage space‣ cost (subscription, IP/bandwidth costs, etc)‣ ease of use/training/support‣ data backup‣ data restoration‣ what features are paid vs free‣ autoscaling/load balancing‣ monitoring‣ compatibility‣ speed (processor, bandwidth, etc)‣ control‣ 3rd party app support‣ consider security, scalability, availability, reliability

W H A T H A P P E N S I F T H E R E ’ S A B R E E C H ?

W H A T H A P P E N S I F T H E Y F O L D ?

W H A T I S T H E U P T I M E ?

W H A T S E C U R I T Y I S O F F E R E D ?

H O W M A N Y S I M U LTA N E O U S U S E R S ?

W H A T A R E Y O U R P E R F O R M A N C E B E N C H M A R K S ?

W H A T S U P P O R T I S O F F E R E D ?

M A I N T E N A N C E S C H E D U L E S

W H A T I S T H E R E S P O N S E T I M E ?

- good checklist of questions from Jessica Bushey et al - Cloud Service Conracts, an issue of trust in Canadian journal of information and library science

LOCK IN

- what happens when license terms change for the worse, or costs increase excessively, or a better system comes along?

QUESTIONShttp://bit.ly/1l5yPSR

YOU AND THE CLOUDbit.ly/VRWWGO

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE CLOUD TOOL?

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PRODUCTIVITY & STORAGE

- lots out there- gdocs, gforms, storage (gdrive, dropbox, box), wunderlist, remember the milk, kanban boards, bookmarking (delicious),

evernote

COLLABORATION

- gdocs, dropbox, etc

THE FUTURE OF THE CLOUD IN LIBRARIES

http://bit.ly/1QMsvMC

OPEN ARCHITECTURE & SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE (SOA)

- more open- apis to work between, share data- move beyond library silos

ASSESSMENT

- more we share, the better we assess- new systems being designed with assessment in mind

DEMAND DRIVEN ACQUISITION (DDA)

better DDA as we can assess better

LINKED DATA

-potential to move towards linked data as we share the work of metadata together- move towards the semantic web- open our data up beyond library systems

WEB DRIVEN

- move to linked data means that more traffic will come from outside our library services

BIG DATA

- with all this information in the cloud, we’re seeing a rise in big data- open, sharing data

DATA AS A SERVICE

- we can start exploring what libraries should do with data as a service- leverage the cloud to support the data needs of our institutions or cities

DATA VISUALIZATION

start doing more with data visualization - our own or supporting others

DIGITAL PUBLICATION

- digitize our own publication, open them up to the world- cloud can help accomplish this, at least in storage

DIGITAL PRESERVATION

- of our own digitized products- of our researchers- of cloud data

QUESTIONS?

KGODFREY@MUN.CA @WEELIBRARIAN

bit.ly/1pAQcqR

THANKS!