Developing a hybrid, sustainable, national user support program for the Nectar Cloud

Researchers across disciplines are increasingly needing digital infrastructure to enable their research. The Nectar Research Cloud is one of these infrastructures to support research outputs, used by more than 4,500 projects and 20,000 users from all of the main research institutions in Australia plus the University of Auckland. However, not all users receive the specific IT training and support to access the Cloud, as part of their usual institutional researcher learning pathways.

An extensive user support and training program has been developed to ensure researchers can access and know how to use this important resource. This talk will cover the process and approach undertaken to set up the user support and training program which included obtaining senior management buy-in and funding, user input and adapting the strategy to adjust to the changing COVID environment.

Come to this talk to find out a) what has been developed so far b) what has been found to work well in developing this program and how we measure this c) where to next for the program d) ways in which you can apply some of the techniques and processes we developed, or start something similar for your organisation.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sonia Ramza
Sonia is a Cloud Skills Specialist with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), providing training, facilitating user support events and documentation for the Nectar Cloud. Previously, she has worked in Researcher Training, Technology and Community Management sectors.

Jo Morris
Jo is the User Support Manager, Research Cloud and Storage at the Australian Research Data Commons. Jo has an IT background and has worked in the Tertiary Education sector for over 20 years with the last 10 focused on supporting research.