What is the Aggie Innovation Platform?
The Aggie Innovation Platform (AIP) is a Hybrid Public and Private Cloud deployment model that primarily provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities to the Texas A&M community.
To create the AIP, Technology Services brought together all three of the best cloud computing providers (AWS, Azure, and Google) and is combining them with our on-premise Aggie Cloud service to provide TAMU students, faculty, and staff with access to state-of-the-art tools to support teaching, research, and administration.
The AIP has been developed to provide the Texas A&M community with access to a simple-to-start, flexible, scalable, secure, and compliant place to create and innovate with minimal barriers or long-term financial investment risk.
Why Cloud for Texas A&M?
Designing, acquiring, supporting and updating IT resources is often a difficult process. In particular, the following challenges are barriers to innovation.
- Purchasing hardware takes a long time.
- Purchasing software is not any easier.
- Contracts take time and are hard to negotiate.
- The campus is very decentralized.
- Security risks are higher than ever.
- Data management is increasingly important.
To address this, Technology Services has combined People, Processes, and Technology to create the AIP while also gathering together a community so participants can learn from and support each other in modernizing the design and delivery of solutions to the university.
Our Vision for AIP - a Launchpad for Innovation
Building this together, for all of us.
Technology Services doesn't want to be the owner of all things cloud-related. Our focus is on establishing a useful framework for the cloud - a framework that both increases the availability of the robust features of the cloud while reducing the burden and barriers to effectively begin using its full capabilities.
We see this cloud framework as very similar to a university campus. A campus with security, boundaries and governance to provide stability and oversight, while simultaneously empowering innovation across a wide range of disciplines.
To this end, we have convened an AIP Technical Governance Group from across the university. The AIP Task Force has been charged with establishing the basic guidelines and structure of this new service.
Additionally, we are working to establish an infrastructure that will significantly simplify the move to the cloud. Standards and efficiencies around Purchasing, Identity Management, Networking and Security will both reduce time and monetary cost while protecting critical university resources.
Community Innovation
“Engineering uses AIP to provide researchers access to computational resources without the overhead of manually procuring individual accounts, managing individual access controls, and invoicing. This allows us to spend more time collaborating with researchers on higher-level activities, such as architectural design."
— Blake Dworaczyk, Engineering IT
Ready to Get Started?
We’re here to help.
- Set up your cloud access quickly and securely
- Plan your cloud application and service architectures
- Integrate with campus infrastructure and on-premise systems