UC Riverside Signs Subscription Deal with Google Cloud to Power Research and IT

• By Rhea Kelly
• 04/04/23

The University of California, Riverside is boosting computing speed, agility, and scale for researchers through a new subscription agreement with Google Cloud. The deal is part of an effort to modernize the institution's enterprise infrastructure and provide more computing flexibility and innovative IT services on campus.

"Modernizing our infrastructure enables us to offer our researchers opportunities that are currently unprecedented in higher education in terms of computing research. We're removing administrative barriers so that our research community can focus on advancing and accelerating important work," explained Matthew Gunkel, associate vice chancellor and CIO of Information Technology Solutions at UCR, in a statement. "We believe this will drive increased research output and a subsequent increase in campus funding, global recognition, and prestigious academic researchers coming to work for the university."

According to a news announcement, Google Cloud will enable IT to provide a range of services, including:

• Researcher access to secure research workstations and storage, auto-scaling high-performance computing clusters, infinity scaling databases, and AI and machine-learning services through the Google Cloud Platform;
• The ability to spin up, scale up, and scale down services through the implementation of a location-agnostic application modernization strategy using Google Cloud Anthos;
• Enterprise-wide data and business intelligence services utilizing Google's Looker and BigQuery for analytics and reporting; and
• Google's Chronicle security operations suite for comprehensive threat detection, analysis, and response.

The Google Cloud subscription is expected to enable two- to three-times growth in UCR's overall computing and storage capacity, and save time and money for both researchers and IT, according to a university news story. For example, in one pilot project the UCR University Extension center was able to migrate its data to Google Cloud in two-and-a-half weeks, a process that would previously have required months.

"Through this new service structure, we aim to empower faculty and students to focus on their research by removing administrative barriers and providing quick access to infrastructure and service," said Gunkel. "The goal is to fuel more discoveries and grants, which in turn will help UCR attract top talent."

"UCR is a trailblazer for higher education institutions and is pushing the boundaries of digital transformation within their field," commented Karen Dahut, CEO of Google Public Sector. "Our partnership is helping to make research accessible and cost-efficient for UCR faculty and students, at a time when improved research outcomes, increased productivity, and collaboration are more important than ever. Our work with UCR allows researchers to focus on the science, while Google Public Sector powers the enterprise infrastructure facilitating the innovation."