Cloud computing has huge potential to accelerate research, enhance collaboration, and enrich education. Educators, research administrators, IT directors, and research should realize and leverage cloud's potential in research, teaching, and learning. They can complement their current in-house cyberinfrastructure by deploying public, private, or hybrid clouds. In fact, as a recent survey reveals, some are already benefiting by embracing the clouds.

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), reveals how cloud is used across a wide variety of scientific fields and the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and illustrates the potential of cloud in accelerating research, enhancing collaboration, and enriching education. The survey conducted from September 2012 to April 2013 received responses from 80 cloud users around the globe. The XSEDE Cloud Survey Report showcases how cloud computing services (computational and sharing capabilities) currently are - and can be – used for doing research in various fields. It also summarizes extensive data on core usage, preferred storage, bandwidth, etc., and discusses cloud benefits and limitations for specific use cases.