The Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE), aims to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community, by bringing together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organisations and the research and education community, through ready-to-use service agreements and €9.5 million in adoption funding.
Cloud-based services offer the European research community a wealth of powerful tools, but for many researchers, these are currently out of reach, with suitable services difficult to find and select.
OCRE, which launched in January 2019, will address this by running a pan-European tender and establishing framework agreements with cloud service providers that meet the specific requirements of the research community, saving institutions the time-consuming and complex process of doing this themselves.
€9.5 million in adoption funding available for European research community
Over 10,000 research and education institutions will be able to directly consume these offerings, with ready-to-use agreements via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service catalogue. Furthermore, OCRE will make €9.5 million in service credits available to research institutions, via adoption funding from the European Commission.
A consortium of competences
The OCRE project - an important element in the success of EOSC - receives funding from the European Commission and is a consortium of the GÉANT Association (coordinator), CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT.
OCRE timeline
In the first half of 2019, OCRE will gather requirements from the research community and input from cloud providers. The pan-European tender is expected to begin in October 2019, with services expected to be available for usage in early 2020. The tender will encompass:
Selected providers will become an integral part of the EOSC service catalogue and be connected to the GÉANT data network and the community's single sign-on (SSO) systems, bringing them into the heart of this community's ICT ecosystem.
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