IBM it has closed your cloud service for education Cloud for Educationjust two years after its launch as a set of “infrastructure and services designed for academic computing needs and research laboratories”, as confirmed in The Register.
Until now, the service offered several types of virtual machines preconfigured and designed for research. Among the applications they included, their own statistical software SPSS. It was launched in April 2021, when IBM saw fit to launch a cloud services vertical for academia and research, noting that “As academic institutions are shifting to distance learning due to the changing nature of education or the pandemic, it is essential to make computer lab resources accessible from outside of campus«.
But on June 30, with most academic institutions back to face-to-face campuses, IBM announced that it was stopping the service immediately. From IBM they point out that they continue to assess their service offer periodically, taking into account the requirements of their clients and the consumption they make of their service offer.
In this regard, the company highlights that since the launch of Cloud for Education, new products and service catalogs have appeared that can be offered to the academic community, exceeding the capabilities of the Cloud for Education service. These products and services include VPC, m Code Engine, and certain Citrix and Dizzion services.
Of course, the disappearance of IBM’s cloud service for education will not be so immediate. It will continue to work as before until November 30. Your current users have already received a request to meet with IBM to see what steps they should take next. As they have confirmed, these meetings will be to clarify how to migrate data and workloads to the services that institutions and laboratories will use from now on.
