Imperial College London

Revolutionising Research with CloudKubed

The Customer

Imperial College London, ranked number 1 in the UK (The Times, The Sunday Times and Daily Mail) and 6th in the world for research (QS World University Rankings 2024), sought a scalable and centralised research solution to meet their increasing demands. With a commitment to research excellence and a reputation for pioneering work in various fields, Imperial needed a partner to streamline their research operations while maintaining strict data security and compliance measures

The Solution

CloudKubed closely collaborated with Imperial’s Research Computing Service team to understand their challenges and research requirements comprehensively. We designed and built a cloud-based Azure TRE to align with Imperial’s strategy and needs, business operations, approval process, and information governance. The TRE has been built using Microsoft’s Open-Source Azure TRE and integrates with a streamlined research request and approval process optimising the end-to-end research journey.

The Challenge

Imperial faced challenges in managing a growing number of research projects within their campus, increasing demand on their Research Computing Service and ensuring appropriate project visibility.

Additionally, Imperial wanted to further streamline and improve the end-to-end research journey from initial approval and compliance through to the provisioning and accessing of resources and tools.

To achieve this Imperial required a scalable, efficient, secure, and streamlined environment to accelerate scientific research and access to tools and resources

The Outcomes

Having delivered the Azure TRE, the university can now effortlessly provision workspaces and workspace services providing researchers with not only the infrastructure
but access to data and a suite of tools and services within
a secured environment. The Azure TRE will accelerate
the provisioning and deployment time for research environments providing an easily scalable cloud-based service ready to support research activity across the university. Imperial now have a future-proof cloud-based Trusted Research Environment for use and adoption across the university and working in partnership with CloudKubed will ensure continual evolution of the TRE service and centralised management and optimisation of research costs.

Why Imperial College London chose CloudKubed

Having previously collaborated with CloudKubed, defining the overarching technology strategy for their Information and Communications Technologies team, Imperial recognised our expertise in Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and specifically Azure TRE. CloudKubed’s unique offering, including a fully supported Managed Service for ongoing platform operations and evolution, solidified the partnership.

“Imperial has a requirement to support a wide range of sensitive data from health care data through to commercially sensitive data. Working with CloudKubed Imperial Research Computing Services group was able to take an initial piece of in house work and through the adoption of the Microsoft Azure TRE framework, with the support of CloudKubed, accelerate the build and deployment of a flexible cloud based environment to support research.”

Andrew Richards - Director of Research Computing