Cloud Needs Assessment Survey 2023

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) seeks to better understand how Canadian researchers would like to use cloud services (i.e., compute and storage) to inform the development of its National Cloud Strategy. The insights gathered through this survey will serve to identify gaps in service provision (i.e., equity and accessibility) and improve the functionality of the Alliance Cloud (i.e., ease of use and navigability).

This survey is aimed at Canadian researchers (i.e., Professors, Administrators, Undergraduate/Graduate Students, Post-Doctoral Fellows, Research Staff or Research Associates), regardless of their level of engagement with the Alliance Cloud (formerly Compute Canada Cloud) or other cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or storage offerings such as Dropbox.

A summary of the findings will be shared with the community in Spring 2023.

The estimated time to complete this survey is 15-20 minutes. Where applicable, data will be aggregated and anonymized.

Your participation is voluntary. Thank you for your time.
 

---

Glossary of key terms and acronyms

• Alliance Cloud - The Alliance’s Cloud Computing offering, formerly known as Compute Canada Cloud. Supports the ability to create Virtual Machines, web-facing resources, and other functionality not available through the Alliance Clusters and Storage services (Cedar, Beluga, etc). More information can be found on the Alliance’s website here.
• Commercial cloud - Publicly-available vendor-provided cloud (E.g., AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Community Cloud - Organizationally-hosted cloud, e.g., Alliance Cloud (formerly Compute Canada Cloud). Please see the NIST term here.