DuraCloud: A Community Cloud for Higher Education

Abstract

DuraCloud is an open-source solution for managing and persisting content in the cloud that’s offered as a service by DuraSpace, a nonprofit serving the higher education community. DuraCloud’s key value proposition is allowing organizations to connect easily with and take advantage of cloud computing and storage, without getting locked into any one specific cloud vendor. DuraCloud works with multiple cloud providers, both commercial and noncommercial. Alternatively, the service can be deployed locally at an institution or among a consortium of schools. The DuraCloud platform supports a number of use cases identified by our community. The initial use case developed provides online backup and archiving and a set of preservation services for managing and persisting digital content.

DuraCloud may be integrated with other DuraSpace supported platforms (namely, the DSpace and Fedora repositories) to provide a complete solution for managing, persisting, and preserving digital artifacts. DuraCloud for backup, archiving, and preservation is available today as a service. This year we are extending DuraCloud to manage research data sets and help institutions meet their data management plan mandates without needing to add local infrastructure. DuraCloud for Research will be an extension of services offered in DuraCloud. We’ll give a strategic overview of DuraCloud and present the planned development and partnerships on the roadmap.