The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has allocated £12.5 million to a new cloud computing shared services initiative for universities and colleges.

The shared cloud services initiative will put £10 million towards building and supporting shared storage and data management services. This amount will be split between building the cloud infrastructure itself, developing a sustainable funding model for the future and building specific data management applications for HE providers.

A further £2.5 million will be spent on developing cloud-based services to support university administration.

JANET (UK), the organisation that runs the higher education sector shared network, will appoint a broker to manage the allocation of cloud services and the relationship with suppliers.

Peter Tinson, executive secretary of the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), said that there is a degree of cultural resistance towards shared services among universities. “I think there’s a fear of loss of control,” he said.

The overall cloud services project will be operated by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).