Globus Participates in the 66th IT Press Tour
| Susan Tussy
Recently Globus participated in the 66th IT Press Tour where Rachana Ananthakrishnan, our Executive Director and Head of Products, briefed a group of journalists on Globus. Here are excerpts from some of the articles that were written, and some of the key takeaways from the briefing:
The Invisible Infrastructure Behind Global Research Data Exchange
By David Marshall
The platform does five things exceptionally well: managed data transfer (fire and forget, with automatic retry and checksum verification), secure data sharing (permission overlays without replicating data), compute orchestration (running Python functions across resources without code changes), metadata and discovery (searchable research datasets), and workflow automation (connecting multiple steps automatically). What’s hard to replicate is the ecosystem. Globus is connected to 2,100+ institutional identity providers through research federation networks. 500+ storage systems are already integrated worldwide. Point solutions exist in each category, but nobody else offers an end-to-end platform that sits on distributed institutional infrastructure while maintaining security across multiple domains.
Building Research Infrastructure at Scale: Inside Globus’s Hybrid SaaS Architecture
By Tom Smith
Research computing faces a unique architectural challenge: how do you build a platform that works across institutional boundaries, handles petabyte-scale data movement, supports diverse storage systems, and maintains fine-grained security controls, all without requiring users to be infrastructure experts? Globus, a non-profit service from the University of Chicago, has spent nearly 30 years solving this problem. What started as the Globus Toolkit for grid computing has evolved into a comprehensive platform-as-a-service that now handles 2 petabytes of data transfer daily across 2,600+ institutions in 80+ countries.
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Security Storage und Channel Germany - News for Information Technology
The Globus Research Data Platform By Von Jakob Jund
The platform faces (addresses) the ongoing challenges inherent to research computing infrastructure: maintaining interoperability across heterogeneous systems, supporting increasingly complex data-sharing requirements, and scaling to accommodate growth in data volumes from advanced instruments. The shift toward AI-driven research workflows adds requirements for managing training datasets and coordinating compute resources across institutional boundaries.
Globus, a strategic platform for data science
By Pierre Khan
This non-profit organization has established itself as a major player in the global scientific infrastructure, serving a very specific market: multi-institutional collaborative research. The platform addresses the unique challenges of the research world, including the need for “secure and open science,” where data is protected during research but ultimately published. It also facilitates collaborations between dozens or even hundreds of researchers from different institutions, each with specific domain requirements and separate data protection agreements.
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File Storage Technologies
by Philippe Nicolas - IT Press Tour
For nearly 30 years, Globus has evolved from early distributed computing and grid technologies into a leading software-as-a-service platform for managing research data, computation, and collaboration at scale. Its work has supported major scientific advances and global research infrastructure, including grid computing contributions associated with Nobel-recognized discoveries and large international scientific collaborations.
Globus provides a comprehensive research IT platform that includes managed data transfer and synchronization, collaborative data sharing, unified data access across storage systems, publication and discovery services, remote compute execution, automation workflows, and metadata indexing for data discovery. Its hybrid architecture integrates hosted cloud services with local agents and institutional resources, enabling secure, federated access and orchestration across laptops, labs, on-prem infrastructure, cloud storage, and HPC facilities. Key capabilities include “fire-and-forget” reliable data transfers, secure tunneling across security boundaries, fine-grained access control for sharing, and federated authentication. ######