Things we are thinking about

In the most recent meeting of the "Cloud" team, 2 issues came up that need further research and set us into some of the gray areas of cloud computing. The first is software licensing in the cloud. Our goal is to provision the analytic instances with the software of choice (within reason) for analysts. The question is whether ICPSR's licenses apply to "virtual space" if we are in fact renting that space from Amazon. We are pursuing it. The second question that requires some experiment is whether those people who want to access the "Cloud" will come in via Windows Remote Desktop or our Citrix server. The tradeoff is security vs ease of use. Remote Desktop is embedded in Windows software whereas users would need to get access to the Citrix system with some software. We are going to test this as we move forward. These two issues will be documented by the team once we have a clearer notion of how this will work.