The pan-European GÉANT network for scientific excellence, research, education and innovation has chosen Orange Business as one of its preferred partners for its Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project. OCRE is designed to provide its members and research and education institutes with all the benefits of cloud, including security, scalability and flexibility.

Through interconnections with its 39 National Research and Education Network (NREN) partners, the GÉANT network is the largest and most advanced research and education (R&E) network in the world, connecting millions of users at 10,000 institutions across Europe and supporting all scientific disciplines.



The knowledge and expertise of Orange in the cloud environment will enable us to give our members the right combination of governance, services and pricing. This will allow our members to tap into the power of a future-proofed cloud infrastructure that will significantly expand their research capabilities.



 

Dave Heyns, Director Cloud and Digital Services, GÉANT

In search of a flexible cloud

GÉANT’s biggest challenge was finding the right partners to expand its OCRE project to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community. The project brings together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organizations and the health, research and education community with ready-to-use service agreements.

GÉANT chose Orange Business for its platform, services and support. Under the terms of the contract, Orange will provide public cloud services via Flexible Engine to National Research Education Networks (NREN) and research and education institutes across Europe. GÉANT will also leverage local, in-country support and capabilities across Europe made available by Orange.

Bringing the power of cloud to research projects

With infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Flexible Engine, the GÉANT community will benefit from the latest cloud infrastructure management innovations, including elastic services to ensure that applications will support aggressive workloads.

Flexible Engine is designed to support emerging technologies such as data management and artificial intelligence (AI). It provides a highly scalable cloud infrastructure that is fully controllable via APIs or a technical console.

Flexible Engine services are part of the sovereign offers within the GAIA-X ecosystem, set up to develop and promote common standards for a transparent and interoperable European data infrastructure.

millions
of users from more than 10,000 institutions across Europe can be supported by the cloud to manage their data