According to this report, "a new peering arrangement being signed today between Microsoft and Janet, the UK's research and education network." Essentially the agreement is to provide cloud access to Microsoft products; "any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft's cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365." In the comments, we read also that janet "are already working on deals with Google and Dropbox – see https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-cloud-services." In general, this seems like a good plan, especially if UK universities are able to save millions of pounds. But there is also good reason to be cautios when you see reports like this stating that "government is currently over-reliant on a small 'oligopoly' of large suppliers (and) benchmarking studies have demonstrated that government pays substantially more for IT when compared to commercial rates."
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