Orange Business Services will support the European ecosystem for scientific excellence, research, education and innovation.
GÉANT has chosen Orange Business Services 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 the benefits of cloud – better security, flexibility, greater efficiency and easier collaboration – and to accelearate cloud adoption.
Take your pick
It brings together cloud providers with earth observation, health, research and education groupa: GÉANT provides a catalogue of connectivity, collaboration and identity services to its users, as well as IT resources through the OCRE programme.
The agreement allows Orange Business Services to sell public cloud services to National Research Education Networks (NREN) and more than 8,000 institutions across Europe with more than 50 million users. It will leverage Orange’s local, in-country capabilities across the continent.
It 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.
Flexible Engine
Orange Business Services will provide its public cloud platform Flexible Engine; infrastructure that can support emerging technologies like data management and AI, with a security perimeter to guarantee the security of the platform.
Flexible Engine services are already in use in various 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.
Governance, services, pricing
Dave Heyns, Director Cloud and Digital Services at GÉANT, said, “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,”
Kristof Symons, EVP, International, Orange Business Services, said, “We are thrilled to be a chosen cloud provider in the…OCRE project…With our extensive GDPR and European regulatory expertise, researchers can have a trusted environment for their own intellectual properties”.