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CloudSigma Joins the OCRE Project and Continues Partnership with the GÉANT Academic Network

Zurich, Switzerland – January 2021– CloudSigma is excited to announce that it has been selected as an official cloud partner of the Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE).

CloudSigma selected for the OCRE project

CloudSigma and OCRE voucher program_logo

The OCRE project aims to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community. It does so by bringing together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organizations, and the research and education community.

Cloud-based services can offer the European research community a wealth of powerful tools. Unfortunately, for many researchers, these are currently out of reach, with suitable services difficult to find and select. The OCRE project addresses this need through ready-to-use service agreements and €9.5 million in adoption funding.

As a recipient of an OCRE IaaS+ framework agreement, CloudSigma is one of the providers that will facilitate easing the access to commercial cloud services for researchers and research institutions in 40 European countries.

OCRE’s voucher program

Previously, CloudSigma was selected as a partner in OCRE’s initial voucher program. The voucher program was a first-phase mini-competition. It was aiming to determine whether the voucher-based system of providing cloud resources will be beneficial for the research community. In fact, CloudSigma was the only cloud provider to fulfill all GÉANT’s requirements for this mini-competition. The process proved to be efficient and successful- CloudSigma has enabled 50 vouchers and has supported a number of successful use cases applied in various areas such as urban traffic optimizations, single-cell sequencing analysis, and extreme weather forecasting. 

The OCRE Cloud Framework

“CloudSigma has been a strong supporter of the European academic and research sectors for over ten years now. We have continued to align our product road map with the demanding needs of these customers and we are pleased to be supporting the OCRE Cloud Framework as an excellent initiative to accelerate the usage and benefits of cloud usage.”Robert Jenkin, CEO @ CloudSigma
The OCRE Cloud Framework and OCRE Cloud Catalogue support state-of-the-art research and explore new ways forward for procuring, funding, and using in-demand digital solutions while benefiting from volume discounts.
You can find CloudSigma’s contact details and services here.

GÉANT Academic Network partnership

CloudSigma has been chosen for the project by OCRE’s coordinator, GÉANT. GÉANT is Europe’s leading collaboration on network and related infrastructure and services for research and education, and operator of the GÉANT network that interconnects Europe’s National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). Furthermore, GÉANT is a part of the OCRE consortium. 

“I am really excited by the opportunities this framework provides for the institutes, the NRENs, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and the successful suppliers of these services. We look forward to showcasing the tremendous benefits that consumable commercial cloud-based services bring to the research and education community in Europe in terms of agility, flexibility, and vastly improved outcomes.”David Heynes, OCRE Project Director @ GÉANT

In fact, CloudSigma has been a preferred partner for cloud services to the GÉANT academic network since 2017. As such, CloudSigma has already been part of the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue IaaS portfolio. As a result of CloudSigma’s selection for the OCRE project, we will continue our partnership with GÉANT for the next four years. The partnership gives CloudSigma the opportunity to offer our cloud services to the research and academic community. Using CloudSigma’s direct peering to GÉANT’s superfast connectivity, researchers can easily scale up their ad-hoc workloads with near-zero latency.

As a member of the GÉANT IaaS portfolio, CloudSigma’s strengths lie in its flexibility, performance, as well as excellent customer support. More than that, CloudSigma is one of the most customizable cloud providers on the market. As a result, customers are able to provision compute processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources at one’s discretion, meaning CPU, RAM, Storage, and bandwidth can be purchased independently to allow the best combination of cloud resources without the limitation of fixed server sizes.

GÉANT is also excited to continue to work with CloudSigma, taking into consideration our extensive experience with research and innovation, as well as Earth Observation.

About OCRE

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is a Horizon 2020 project. It is funded by the European Union. Furthermore, it aims to enable and facilitate research institutions to use commercial digital services in a safe and easy manner. The Consortium delivering the project includes GÉANT (coordinator), CERN, RHEA, and Trust-IT. You can find OCRE on Twitter, LinkedIn, and email.

About CloudSigma

CloudSigma is a pure-cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that’s enabling the digital industrial economy through its highly-available, flexible, enterprise-class hybrid cloud servers and cloud hosting solutions in Europe, the United States, Asia, and Australia. CloudSigma is the most customizable cloud provider on the market. Furthermore, it gives customers full control over their cloud and eliminates restrictions on how users deploy their computing resources. With CloudSigma, customers can provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources as they please. Customers can also extend private networks out of existing infrastructure and elastically into CloudSigma’s IaaS cloud. Thus, they can create easy-to-manage and transparent hybrid cloud solutions. For more information, please visit www.CloudSigma.com or find the company on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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About Zhenya Mocheva

Zhenya is a Digital Marketing Expert at CloudSigma, focusing on brand strategy, social media marketing and digital marketing campaigns. She is passionate about the continuous innovation within the digital environment and the endless growth opportunities that inbound marketing brings.