The Alliance’s new strategy for cloud computing in Canada

Researcher uploading and transferring data from smartphone to cloud computing

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) has released its National Cloud Strategy for 2025-30.

The adoption of cloud technologies is growing in higher education research worldwide, and Canada needs a unified and long-term strategy for cloud computing to meet the evolving needs of researchers.

The Alliance’s National Cloud Strategy offers a vision for cloud computing that will leverage an enhanced and rich suite of cloud services to accelerate research projects and increase research capacity and knowledge creation. It also offers recommendations in the areas of people and community, policy, infrastructure and services, data, security, training and support, and governance, coordination and partnership.

Key goals:

  1. Meet the digital research infrastructure (DRI) resource demand from the Canadian academic research community leveraging traditional high-performance computing (HPC), community cloud, and commercial cloud resources, combined with effective and efficient use of hybrid cloud services
  2. Provide an on-demand approach to the provision of cloud resources and one tailored to the needs of specific communities of practice

Key facts:

  • Researchers need substantial digital research infrastructure resources and services, and the Alliance and member institutions currently do not meet the demand for capacity or for specific software tools and resources
  • Canadian researchers are increasingly adopting cloud resources: the number of projects registered to use the Alliance’s community cloud grew from 220 in 2018 to 950 in 2023
  • Many researchers use their own personal funding to access cloud services, and this is particularly evident in the social sciences and humanities
  • Projects that are smaller, based at small institutions, and developed in disciplines with incompatible funding schemes and/or less technical training and resources, are all at risk for inequitable access to cloud technologies

Background information:

For more information about the Alliance’s National Cloud Strategy, please contact [email protected].