UArizona Continues Cloud Award Streak

Nov. 4, 2019
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Keith Fowlkes, VP of Technology Contracts, E&I; Mike Florian, UITS Financial Analyst; Derek Masseth, UArizona CTO; Rick Haugerud, Cloud Awards judge

The third time is charming! With a 2019 win, the University of Arizona has been recognized in every E&I Cooperative Services’ Cloud Leadership Awards since their inception in 2017.

This year, E&I chose Arizona as Runner-Up in the Cloud Storage category for our Public Cloud Cost Optimization initiative.

It’s a win for the university’s budget, too.

Derek Masseth, the university's Chief Technology Officer, explains, “Moving to the cloud already saves us $3 million annually on computer hardware and associated costs. The Public Cloud Cost Optimization initiative goes further by searching for efficiencies in our cloud spending.” An additional $300,000 in annual savings, to be exact.

Cloud providers generally charge customers only when resources are being used or reserved. After extensively analyzing past usage and creating future projections, UITS teams were able to find ways to save on cloud purchases, such as:
• terminating idle resources
• shutting down development and test resources during non-business hours
• leveraging reserved instances for heavily utilized resources

Derek and Mike Florian, a financial analyst at UITS, represented the university at the awards ceremony, held during the EDUCAUSE annual conference in Chicago. This recognition on Cloud Storage is a testament to the hard work of UITS teams from Finance & Administration, to Enterprise Cloud Services, to our infrastructure specialists, to every application group with services located in the cloud.

The E&I’s annual awards recognize achievements in higher education cloud implementation.

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