Cloud services for education and teaching

High performance computing tasks jointly performed by groups of researchers, or coding classes arranged in virtual classrooms, require efficient and reliable IT services. With cloud services, you can work with your colleagues wherever you want, quickly and in a flexible manner. CSC's cloud services are specifically tailored for the needs of research and teaching.

Pouta is a general-purpose cloud service and particularly well-suited for the needs of computing customers. It provides a virtual IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) computing environment, based on CSC's HPC computing infrastructure. You can set up computing environments in the Pouta cloud service in accordance with your needs. With Pouta, you can create virtual machines for your students, set up clusters for processing big data, produce personalised computing environments and create application development environments. Researchers in Finland may use Pouta cloud services free of charge.

Sensitive data requires special data security measures. Pouta comprises two separate services: ePouta and cPouta. The ePouta service is particularly well-suited for analysing and processing sensitive data. All data stored in CSC clouds is kept securely in Finland.

In addition to Pouta, CSC can also supply you with the commercial ‘Infrastructure as a Service' cloud services. GÉANT, a pan-European data network player in research and teaching, has selected these services in a tendering process. The services are particularly well-suited for the IT administrations of higher education institutions, supplementing CSC's own cloud services. The virtualisation platform based on the VMware virtual resourcing is also available through CSC.