GÉANT selects Orange Business Services as its trusted cloud service provider for pan-European educational and research ecosystems

• Trusted cloud services offered to 8,000 institutions and 50 million users in Europe
• Designed to accelerate cloud adoption in European research groups

Orange Business Services has been selected by GÉANT as one of its preferred partners in its Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE). OCRE is designed to provide academic and research institutions with all the benefits of cloud, including enhanced security, flexibility, improved efficiencies and collaboration, for their projects.

The OCRE project aims to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community by bringing together cloud providers with earth observation, health, research and education groups. The agreement enables Orange Business Services to sell public cloud services to National Research Education Networks (NREN) and more than 8,000 institutions across Europe – covering over 50 million users – and leverages Orange local, in-country support and capabilities across Europe

GÉANT is a fundamental part of Europe’s e-infrastructure, delivering a pan-European network for scientific excellence, research, education and innovation. It provides a catalog of connectivity, collaboration and identity services to its users, as well as IT resources through the OCRE program. OCRE delivers a process for the selection and adoption of cloud-based tools via a framework of agreements with service providers. These are designed to meet the specific requirements of all the various research and education communities.

Accelerating cloud adoption in the European research and education communities with Orange trusted cloud and cloud expert services

Orange Business Services will provide its trusted public cloud platform Flexible Engine, a high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting emerging technologies, such as big data management and artificial intelligence (AI), with a security perimeter to guarantee the security of the platform.

Flexible Engine services are already leveraged in numerous European initiatives and will be part of the sovereign offers within the GAIA-X ecosystem, which was set up to develop and promote common requirements for a transparent and interoperable European data infrastructure. Orange is one of the 22 founding members of GAIA-X, contributing to the development of the guidelines and core services for this new federated, open data infrastructure based on European values.

« “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,” said Dave Heyns, Director Cloud and Digital Services, GÉANT.

“We are thrilled to be a chosen cloud provider in the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project. By teaming with Orange Business Services, GÉANT has a trusted and global digital services partner capable of delivering the agility of cloud and associated professional services to research and education groups across Europe. This will enable them to remain at the forefront of research and innovation. With our extensive GDPR and European regulatory expertise, researchers can have a trusted environment for their own intellectual properties,” said Kristof Symons, Executive Vice President, International, Orange Business Services.