Last year I was asked to join the organising committee for the Eduserv JISC ‘Repositories in the Cloud‘ event that was held at the fantastic Magic Circle venue near Euston Station. The sell out day was a great success, the speakers giving an excellent overview of the current state of the art for cloud computing applications in the area of repository storage in particular. ‘Compute’ in the cloud was also discussed as one of main benefits of cloud technology in helping to reduce bandwidth by placing the compute next to the storage.

It was clear from the event that it’s still quite early days in the use of cloud technologies for repositories, and many have the usual concerns based around the security, control and licensing of the data that you often hear for cloud storage in general. The idea of going for a hybrid approach sounded like a sensible option, where you may keep critical and important data on your own servers, and use the cloud for less critical data, or perhaps use it more as a backup service.

Video recordings of the presentations by Michele Kimpton, CBO DuraSpace, ‘DuraCloud – Open technologies and services for managing durable data in the cloud’, Alex Wade, Director Scholarly Communication, Microsoft Research, ‘Cloud Services for Repositories’, and Les Carr, EPrints, University of Southampton, ‘EPrints Cloud Visions’ are now available on the Eduserv event page.

I caught up with most of the speakers, and a number of the attendees for some quick video reactions, thoughts and commentary. These are available on the event page and I’ve included them here:

Michele Kimpton	Alex Wade	Les Carr	Brad McLean
Ross MacIntyre	Michael Guthrie	John Salter	Rob Sanderson
Simeon Warner	Kevin Ashley	Jane Stevenson	Dave Tarrant