Designed specifically with researchers in mind, the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Cloud will augment an already rich set of IT services at the University of Birmingham and will be used by academics across all disciplines, from Medicine to Archaeology, and Physics to Theology. “We are very proud of the new system, but building a research cloud isn’t easy,” said Simon Thompson, Research Computing Infrastructure Architect in IT Services at the University of Birmingham. “We challenged a range of carefully-selected partners to provide the underlying technology.”