CloudSigma selected for the initial voucher program of the OCRE project

The OCRE project

The Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE) was launched in 2019. Its aim is to bring together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organizations, and the research and education community in order to accelerate cloud adoption.

Cloud-based services offer the European research community a wealth of powerful tools. Unfortunately, for many researchers, these are currently out of reach. Suitable services can get difficult to find and select. The OCRE project addresses this need. OCRE aims to facilitate cloud adoption among European researchers by running a pan-European tender. In addition, the project will establish framework agreements with cloud service providers that meet the specific requirements of the research community.

The project has secured €9.5 million in adoption funding from The European Commission. Furthermore, OCRE is one of the projects contributing to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It provides a path for commercial providers to offer their services in this European single marketplace for research services. Key to this will be OCRE’s ready-to-use-service agreements. They will allow research and education institutions to connect with cloud service providers and directly consume their offers.

CloudSigma selected for OCRE’s initial voucher program

“We are delighted that CloudSigma has been selected for the first phase of the OCRE project. We are looking forward to continuing our work with them into the future and helping support research and education across Europe.”David Heynes, Manager Cloud Services @ GÉANT

CloudSigma is thrilled to announce that the company was selected as a cloud partner for the initial phase of the OCRE project. CloudSigma has been chosen as a service provider for the voucher program 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). In fact, CloudSigma has been a preferred partner for cloud services to the GÉANT academic network since 2017. As such, CloudSigma is a part of the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue IaaS portfolio. GÉANT is particularly excited to work with CloudSigma, taking into consideration our extensive experience with research and innovation, as well as Earth Observation.

As a member of the GÉANT IaaS portfolio, CloudSigma’s strengths lie in its flexibility, performance, and 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.

CloudSigma services for education and research institutions

CloudSigma has provided cloud services to many research and education institutions, including Westminster University, Brunel University, the Technical University of Berlin, and many more. As a GÉANT partner, CloudSigma’s cloud solutions:

• meet European and national regulations
• have attractive pricing
• connect to the community’s networks and identity management capabilities
• can be purchased in a controlled and transparent manner.

“At CloudSigma we have a long track record of working with academic institutions that utilize the GÉANT network heavily. Therefore, we are delighted to become a part of this great initiative of the GÉANT, CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT Consortium. As an OCRE partner, CloudSigma will further strengthen its position as an experienced education and research cloud provider. We are glad to have the opportunity to empower the European research community with reliable cloud infrastructure to advance its innovations.” Robert Jenkin, CEO @ CloudSigma

In addition, CloudSigma has collaborated with a number of intergovernmental organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), each benefiting from the excellent price-performance ratio offered by CloudSigma.

Furthermore, CloudSigma has taken part in a number of collaborative research and innovation projects that are partially funded by the European Commission. These projects successfully increase our exposure to new user groups. In addition, they give us the opportunity to explore research topics we identify as being essential, to meeting the demands of our customers. For example, some of those initiatives are the CloudiFacturing project, the COLA project, and the DITAS project.

CloudSigma’s participation in the OCRE Vouchers Program allows us to connect with even more members of the European research community. That is why we couldn’t be more excited and look forward to the start of the voucher program.