Following a successful final review by the European Commission, the Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE) celebrates the project’s conclusion and its remarkable achievements, GÉANT wrote in this original article.

GÉANT, OCRE’s coordinator, extended its appreciation to Trust-IT along with partner organisations CERN, and RHEA, as well as to contractors EARSC, Evenflow and SixSq for their contributions and for their dedication to the project’s success.

As part of the project, Trust-IT coordinated the work on outreach and requirements gathering that contributed to enabling the project to achieve the significant European scale it has achieved through the development and implementation of a communication and engagement strategy which included the development of a website, maintenance of social media and email channels, organisation of webinars, workshops and a conference, and production of communication materials. Trust-IT was also responsible for the development of the OCRE Cloud and EO Catalogues - one of the key exploitable results of the project. See original article here. 

Unlocking the potential of cloud and EO services for European research

Concluded in December 2022, OCRE delivered significant impact by facilitating and accelerating consumption of commercial cloud and Earth Observation (EO) services for the European research and education community. In order to do that, in 2019 OCRE ran a pan-European tender, resulting in the OCRE Cloud Framework, which enabled more than 10,000 European institutions to easily access a broad and varied catalogue of digital services, at reduced costs.

Since its launch, the OCRE framework has opened the way for sustained and unrelenting growth in service adoption, and it’s now counting more than 800 institutions in 26 European countries actively consuming public cloud services. In particular, 2022 registered the highest numbers to date, with cumulative total consumption of cloud services via the OCRE framework and its predecessor reaching €160 million, of which approximately €69 million consumed only in 2022 – a trend expected to keep growing throughout 2023.

With the OCRE project reaching its conclusion, the support to the framework will continue via the GÉANT GN5-1 project, which will also execute a new public tender for a following cloud framework.