Cardiff University delivers collaborative research in the UK and Kazakhstan using SoftwareOne on Google Cloud

A flexible working vision for a cloud-first campus

When Lee Evans, Assistant IT Director at Cardiff University, first approached Google Cloud about setting up the cloud-first campus, the university’s Google account manager invited SoftwareOne to join the conversation. Evans decided to work with SoftwareOne based on the strength of that initial engagement. “We felt we were in a safe pair of hands,” says Evans. “I knew based on that initial engagement that SoftwareOne had the knowledge and expertise that we needed and knew how they would set things up quickly and efficiently. We were also impressed with their experience working with other educational institutions as well.”

SoftwareOne was also able to help the university apply for, and receive, Google credits to support the deployment of the cloud solution.

The university used the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) procurement framework to simplify the onboarding process with Google Cloud. OCRE provides access for more than 25,000 academic and research institutions across Europe and connects them with pre-approved providers offering cost-effective cloud pricing. SoftwareOne is the number one Google Cloud partner in 16 countries on the OCRE framework, supporting academic and research institutions in more than 35 European countries.

With researchers already using Google Cloud applications, albeit in a decentralized way, the IT team wanted to apply controls to manage usage and costs. For its new campus in Kazakhstan, the university wanted to avoid deploying multiple technology solutions and simply reuse what it had already built in Cardiff. The goal was to offer users in Kazakhstan the same computing experience as users in Wales and to enable seamless collaboration with users in both countries on research projects. The solution would ultimately need to support 600–800 students and staff across both campuses.

Secure by Design to safeguard users and data

SoftwareOne led the initial discovery and design stage of the project. Fact finding determined the university’s existing level of cloud maturity and helped to establish the requirements for the platform. The project team outlined the early dependencies to focus on what needed to be delivered in turn. Once the OCRE procurement process was complete, the team was set up with a billing ID on Google within less than 24 hours and it was ready to build.

The project team decided to run a proof of concept (PoC) to explore the viability of the proposed approach. The first PoC focused on building Python programming skills and projects for computer science students using Colab Enterprise in both locations. Colab Enterprise’s cloud-based Jupyter Notebook environment enables users to write and run Python code directly through the browser and is particularly suited to machine learning, data analysis, and virtualization workloads. Importantly, Colab Enterprise also offered the rich collaboration features needed to enable joined-up, remote working across the campuses. The initial Python PoC would need to support 200 users.

As SoftwareOne’s technical support partner, Qodea led the deployment of the Google Landing Zone using Terraform infrastructure as code. It proactively applied Secure by Design practices, ensuring robust security principles were integrated from day one to protect the university's data and users. This foundational work included linking the landing zone to Cardiff University’s existing Microsoft Entra ID IAM service to deliver role-based access, single sign-on (SSO), and comprehensive log-based auditing, resulting in a seamless user experience.