When Dr Kay Ayre* was a special education researcher at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) she would carry a portable hard drive to regularly back up her files of data.

“Doing this was quite unsettling,” she said, “because there was always the risk of the drive being lost, left somewhere or left at home when needed at work or vice versa. Plus, it was easy to forget to back up regularly and that could be problematic.”

Fortunately, she attended an information session at USQ in which QCIF’s USQ-based eResearch Analyst Dr Francis Gacenga introduced academic staff to QRIScloud, QCIF’s cloud computing service, and Nextcloud, an application designed to facilitate access, sharing and collaboration across data sets.