E-infrastructure

The digital environment of higher education institutions includes local server systems and increasingly cloud systems, as a flexible environment for storage, application management, backup and content sharing among teachers and students. The use of cloud infrastructure allows for greater scalability, availability and security of services, as well as reducing the burden on local IT resources. The establishment of hybrid models that combine local services with clouds allows for greater adaptability.

Institutions such as Srce and CARNET play a key role in the development of server and cloud infrastructure for higher education in Croatia. Srce is the leading service provider through the Croatian Scientific and Educational Cloud (HR‑ZOO) project, which enables the development of virtual data centres, cloud resources, grid and HPC capacities in several locations across the country. Their services such as Isabella (HPC cluster) and HTC Cloud are based on open-source technologies (OpenStack and Ceph) and offer research and academic community virtual machines, large storage and high-performance computing infrastructure. On the other hand, CARNET provides cloud services and IT infrastructure for the education system, including hosting, virtual servers, educational portals and e-learning, supporting digital transformations in schools and faculties.

Example: The MS Azure platform is used to create e-portfolios for students that document their progress and development throughout their studies. The cloud enables safe storage of portfolios, exchange of feedback and insight into work tasks regardless of the user's location.