This week’s Weekly Update looks at recent attempts by UK universities to save money and pool resources by building themselves a private cloud. The Register reports news of a Further Education college (roughly equivalent to a community college in the U.S.) doing something rather different, and shifting a lot of their computing to Iceland’s Thor data center. In both cases, securing a direct connection to JANET (the UK education sector’s high speed network) has been key. For the university cloud, for example, it is a key aspect of their ability to offer prices far lower than the commercial competition can (currently) match. In both cases, the institutions concerned are taking a fresh look at the shape of the education sector’s computing requirements, leading to different but equally interesting experiments. Whether either or both gain significant traction remains to be seen.