Benefits
The SMCE provides the following benefits to NASA Principal Investigators (PIs):
Quick
Quick and cost-effective access to large quantities of storage and processing for data and computing
Accelerate project research with fast access to high performance, agile information technology (IT)
Provides an infrastructure for seamless transitions from development to production environments
Reduced project delays
Agile
Elastic resources enable scaling up or down based on computing and storage needs while optimizing costs and usage
Enables the ability to manage user accounts within their project while the SMCE monitors and tracks user roles, security policies, and more
Projects can grow and shrink quickly according to requirements
Financial
Maximizes research investment by spending less time on IT
Instantly know how much projects are spending in proportion to time and make decisions to minimize costs
Simplified methods for transferring funding to support requirements and begin conducting research
Near real time access to charges enabling cost control
Collaborative
Encourages collaboration by making it easy for projects to share data and resources
Encourages NASA-funded researchers to develop cloud-native products adhering to NASA standards and promotes easy end-user implementations and reuse of developed tools
Projects can agilely work with end-user communities to build the tools they need
Faster adoption of capabilities by end-user communities
Drives up innovation by reuse of developed tools and collaboration
Reduced Risk
Provides control of software and the computing environment while still maintaining NASA security requirements
Supplies services for security logging records of all cloud activity, defining user roles and permissions, approval for projects, trusted templates to start projects, and continuous scanning for vulnerabilities
Projects can obtain the resources they require
Eases the transition to production with identical development and production environments
Incorporates security throughout the project through managed environments