ARCHIVED: Completed project: Kumo: IU Cloud Storage as a service for other institutions

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Primary UITS contact: John Hoerr

Completed: September 4, 2014

Description: Cloud storage provides a simple solution for mapping a user's storage of choice to both virtual and conventional applications. It provides a "bring your own data" service that permits students, faculty, and staff to use whatever storage provider they prefer (local or cloud-based) and have their settings always be their default when they log in to lab systems and virtual applications.

Although developed for IU, UITS is also able to offer cloud storage as a solution to other schools by using a smart client and hosting this as a cloud-based service.

IU will provide licensing institutions with:

A client installer
An access broker service installer
A cloud-based portal for setting/storing user preferences, administration, and access tokens

Participating schools will only need to have the ability to:

Federate (either Shibboleth or ADFS)
Install the client
Operate (and secure!) a basic Windows server, and install the access broker service

Outcome: A multi-tenant service that provides schools with a simple, easy-to-use, low overhead solution for meeting the users' storage needs.

Milestones and status:

January 2012: Development started
August 2012: Production and rollout of 1.0 with support for Box and Dropbox
November 2012: Added support for Google Drive and OneDrive
May 2013: Re-architected service to enable federation and use by other institutions
June 2013: Working 2.0 prototype established. Initial security review completed
July 2013: Internal testing begins
October 2013: Release. Begin onboarding partner institutions for external testing
July 2014: 2.1 release, focusing on performance, stability, and notification enhancements
August 2014: First partner institutions enter wide release

Benefits:

Eliminates the need to provide and manage local storage for users of conventional or virtual desktops
Integrates with both traditional and virtual apps so that storage is always mapped according to the user's preferences regardless of the device used
Use of integrated authentication eliminates repeated entry of credentials.
Fixes the Citrix problem of "locating my files" on virtual systems
Simple to deploy

Related information:

Client impact: This service will supercede the cloud storage system currently deployed.

Project team:

John Hoerr
Patrick Keenan
Brent Moberly
John Grigutis