OpenAthens chooses Google Cloud

Identity and federated access management provider OpenAthens has chosen Google Cloud Platform as its public cloud partner.

The move to a public cloud, engineered by IT director, Neil Scully, and application architect David Orrell, signifies a new phase in the evolution of OpenAthens in its mission to remove barriers to knowledge and connect people around the world to information.

OpenAthens selected Google Cloud and its Kubernetes managed environment as the optimum solution to streamline the process of deploying, updating and managing its applications and services.

Neil Scully said: 'We felt strongly that moving to Google’s public cloud offered the best range of features to enable us to independently manage our applications in a secure environment.

'We now have a lighter-weight infrastructure model which allows us to be more agile with greater efficiency in the way we work. The result is increased availability with fewer instances of planned maintenance requiring applications to be taken out of service.  This means increased reliability and less service disruption for our customers.”

'Being in partnership with Google adds real value and enhanced global credibility for our worldwide clients. Security and stability of our systems are of the utmost importance to OpenAthens and this platform enables us to manage the architecture as high up the tech stack as possible. We no longer need to separately manage servers – we can focus on the deployment and efficiency of our applications and this makes for a better user experience for customers.'

One of the key benefits to using Google Cloud, says OpenAthens, is that its team can manage its full systems independently without having to rely on outside support for new projects or updates. Additionally, autoscaling features mean the platform can proactively respond to demand peaks which means a highly consistent experience for users.

The platform also means that test and development areas do not need to run at times when the team is not working, for example, the agile nature of Google Cloud means these areas are turned off at weekends when no one is working on them.

The transfer to OpenAthens’ Google Cloud has now been completed and its global customers which span the publishing, healthcare, education and research sectors are already experiencing the benefits of the move.