The Group’s Global Services practice and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accelerate research innovation for MIT, through a cloud self-service portal.

The venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology supports thousands of researchers across diverse disciplines. Prodigious demand for advanced ‘compute’, AI/ML and data-intensive workloads led MIT to seek a way to provide more rapid access to cloud services.

MIT partnered with the Global Services practice and AWS, to modernize its Cloud Accounts Portal and transform how researchers provision and consume cloud services, in pursuit of reduced time-to-research without compromising security, compliance or financial accountability.

Working closely with AWS, Global Services designed and deployed a self-service cloud portal built on a standardized, multi-account AWS architecture and infrastructure-as-code automation. This allows researchers to independently provision approved cloud services including GPU compute, scalable storage and managed AI/ML environments, with embedded governance, cost control and compliance.

The technology supports multiple regulated research environments including HIPAA- and FedRAMP-aligned organizational units. Cost transparency was a core design principle, with integrated budgets, cost allocation frameworks and dashboards for visibility into usage and cost, for researchers and administrators.

The initiative began as an AWS pilot for 40 researchers, and has led to a well-governed, decentralized, highly scalable model for research computing.  MIT, Global Services and AWS were invited to showcase the portal at AWS re:Invent 2025.