Trust-IT closes OCRE with major pan-European impact on commercial cloud in research

In December 2022, Trust-IT closed the Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE) with its wide-ranging impacts on how European research and academia carries out its day to day work through the wide availability of cloud services.

The results of the project were highlighted during the OCRE Final Event: Driving Innovation Through the Adoption of Commercial Cloud and EO Services held from 6-7 December 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal. 

OCRE showed how it has bridged the supply and demand sides and more than doubled cloud adoption by the European research community. Now, the research community and 10,000 research institutions can benefit from the digital single market for cloud and digital Earth observation (EO) services,also providing the first significant set of commercial providers to the EOSC Exchange. These benefits include being able to easily find and select suitable services, quickly validate services, get access to ready-to-use agreements with providers, ensure legal and technical compliance, and benefit from volume discounts.

The project produced four key exploitable results namely, the OCRE Cloud and EO Service Catalogues, Business Models: Funding and Procurement Mechanisms, the EOSC Test Suite for Commercial Services and Survey Outcomes on Commercial Cloud and EO Services Demand. Use cases for both cloud and EO services were also brought forward. 

For the OCRE Cloud and EO Service Catalogues, OCRE ran a pan-European procurement resulting in the OCRE Cloud Catalogue of compliant cloud-based providers in 40 European countries that are part of the OCRE Cloud Framework. EO service providers that have also been mapped as part of the EO funding opportunities have also been compiled in the OCRE EO Catalogue. These allow research institutions to easily approach and select suppliers. 

To deliver its Business Models: Funding and Procurement Mechanisms, OCRE engaged both the demand side (research community) and supply side (commercial cloud and EO suppliers) and involved them in procurement activities. The project also piloted its business models through distribution of EU funding for commercial services to research projects. The OCRE IaaS+ Framework resulted in significant uptake of cloud in Europe with exponential growth in framework contract use compared to the previous framework.

The EOSC Test Suite for Commercial Services is an open-source tool for benchmark testing and validation of commercial cloud services. The test suite, which is proposed to be incorporated into the EOSC Core, can help research institutions take informed decisions on choosing digital services in EOSC while also helping providers benchmark and improve their offering to the research community.

At the beginning of the project, the project delivered Survey Outcomes on Commercial Cloud and EO Services Demand to identify demands for these types of services.

The OCRE project was coordinated by GÉANT with CERN and RHEA along with Trust-IT as beneficiaries. The European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC), Evenflow and SixSq were also involved in the project as contractors.