The joint venture of Microsoft and Janet, the research and education network has led to the rendering of cloud based services based on Windows Azure to more than 18 million teachers and students in British universities.
Microsoft alliance with Janet
Janet is a private network used by UK universities. Instead of relying on slow and sluggish public internet, Janet provides its own network connections with high-speed and security to the educational institutes.
Following the strategic alliance with Microsoft, the capability afforded by Janet’s peering with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud with high-bandwidth secure connections will create new opportunities for researchers and the university community as a whole.
The peering agreement will provide, researchers, academics and students with high-speed access to Microsoft Cloud services they can use for both study and their personal life including Bing, Skype, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Lync.
Some UK universities already have over £20 million of research projects that are supported by the cloud but a major barrier that holds them from further adopting the cloud services is the time it takes to transfer large datasets from the lab to the cloud for analysis.
The new link between Janet and the Azure Cloud aims to remove this barrier as the alliance will allow a far greater range of research projects to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing. Realizing the importance of cloud computing, Microsoft is planning to come up with 2 new data centers in Australia to support the expansion of this kind of services.
The deal between Microsoft and Janet was signed at the Goldsmiths University of London. For more information you can see this page.
