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Helmholtz Cloud in Numbers: First Survey Insights

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Picture of Spicker, Annette  Spicker, Annette

Posted on:

Wed., 08 Oct. 2025

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News

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Helmholtz Cloud Cloud Services Survey

AI Assistance: Heavy

Helmholtz Cloud in Numbers: First Survey Insights

How do Helmholtz IT departments actually use the Helmholtz Cloud? To find out, we recently asked the IT leads of all 18 Helmholtz Centers and the Head Office two simple questions for each of the 32 services currently available:

  1. Is this service used at your center?
  2. Does the HIFIS solution replace your own local service?

The results provide a first quantitative picture of Helmholtz-wide service adoption.

Usage in Numbers

Graph showing Helmholtz Cloud Services on the y-axis and the number of Helmholtz Centers using this service on the x-axis.
  • All 32 services are in use across Helmholtz. Each service is used by at least two centers.
  • In total, we counted 211 service usages across 19 Helmholtz Centers including the head office.
  • So far, 71 services have been replaced, discontinued, or not implemented thanks to the Helmholtz Cloud.
  • 11 services are used by at least half of the centers, including favorites like Mattermost, LimeSurvey, Collabtex, Blablador, Codebase, Notes, HIFIS Events, Helmholtz RSD, SciFlow, and Zammad.
  • 3 services are close to being universally adopted (17–18 centers): Mattermost, LimeSurvey, and Nextcloud.
Ggraph showing Helmholtz Cloud Services on the y-axis and the number of Helmholtz Centers replacing a local resource with this service on the x-axis.

First Insights

The survey highlights a few trends:

  • Helmholtz Cloud services are preferred whenever there is no local solution available, or if the local one lacks collaboration features.
  • Some Helmholtz Cloud services fill very specific niches — their relevance depends strongly on scientific use cases.
  • For now, central IT can only estimate how widely services are actually used. Setting up a technical infrastructure that measures user numbers per center will provide deeper insights. Thus will allow strategic decisions.

What’s Next?

The results confirm that the Helmholtz Cloud, managed by HIFIS, has become a valuable part of the digital research landscape at Helmholtz. Still, the composition of the portfolio — and how it matches researchers’ needs — remains a dynamic process.

And this is where you come in:

👉 Tell us which services you enjoy most and which you miss at support@hifis.net.
👉 Have a look at what’s already available in the Helmholtz Cloud.
👉 Find out what the users think: Results of the Helmholtz Cloud Survey.

Changelog

  • 2025-10-27: add link to users survey and reformulate service usage.