30/09/2025
“Clouds are important services that can be used by the R&E institutions to boost their…
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On September 23, 2025, the National Research and Education Network RENAM organizes the Infoshare ‘OCRE…
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“Clouds are important services that can be used by the R&E institutions to boost their activities with scalable solutions, focusing on core scientific discovery and education, rather than server management. And OCRE 2024 removes the barriers for this!” – this was the central message of the Infoshare ‘OCRE 2024 Framework in Moldova’ held on September 23, 2025.
This one-and-a-half-hour online event was attended by 25 representatives from 17 different organisations, including national stakeholders such as Moldovan ministries, universities, and research institutions. The event was organized by RENAM, the Moldovan NREN, and highlighted the cloud platforms available in Moldova through OCRE 2024 (which include AWS, Exoscale, Google Cloud, CloudFerro, and Setcor).
The introduction was given by Olga Popcova of RENAM, who presented GÉANT’s vision on providing equal network access and services for all scientists across Europe, the drivers of cloud adoption in R&E sector, increasing statistics about the countries and institutions involved in previous OCRE frameworks, the work done on scoring this European tender, OCRE 2024 benefits (such as expanded set of services, reduced costs, discounts and stronger alignment with EU regulations), and 3 groups of eligible institutions. She also addressed the peculiarities of Moldovan legislation in relation to OCRE 2024 and RENAM support, as an NREN with a default role, to the Moldovan R&E community.
In the first presentation, Paolo Perulli of Sparkle, the first-ranked service provider for two platforms – AWS and Google Cloud – talked about Sparkle’s background as a leading global telecommunications service operator, its service portfolio for R&E institutions’ needs, Sparkle’s offering conditions in OCRE 2024, Sparkle’s additional value in a nutshell (including professional services), and a strong focus on customer support through Sparkle Multicloud Competence Center. Additionally, use cases from various domains were outlined, focusing on several of them: analysis of liquid biopsies for real-time tumour monitoring (University of Antwerp, Belgium); data processing activities in the iCANDID3.0 SSH FAIR Data Hub (KU Leuven, Belgium); enhancing cloud capacity in a distributed research environment (National Research Council, Italy) and realizing scientific breakthroughs in childhood cancer (Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, the Netherlands).
In the second presentation, Aarno Aukia of VSHN, the first-ranked service provider for the Exoscale platform, stressed the complexity of finding relevant research papers within a rapidly increasing global volume of publications, showcasing ASReview – an open-source, AI-assisted systematic review software (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), where VSHN offers a managed hosting solution through OCRE within Exoscale sovereign cloud infrastructure. He also provided information about Exoscale and its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and IaaS+ service portfolios, VSHN’s background as a DevOps company, Exoscale’s offering conditions in OCRE 2024, and R&E organisations in Europe that use the Exoscale platform.
In the third presentation, Jakub Kowalczyk of CloudFerro, the original infrastructure provider, emphasized how the challenges faced by most researchers needing access to limited cloud resources can be overcome using the OCRE 2024 Framework. He presented 2 use cases – the calculation of glacier movement (University of Twente, the Netherlands) and fast access to IaaS cloud services with a scientific discount (University of Dublin, Ireland) – as well as an overview of CloudFerro company, CloudFerro’s offering conditions in OCRE 2024 (including Earth Observation data, Sherlock for generative AI, and support services), and 5 steps on how to get from idea to proof of concept utilizing free credits for innovation.
Finally, Tomislav Pojatina of Setcor, the original infrastructure provider, spoke about Setcor’s profile as a cloud solutions and services company, its experience in delivering customers tailor-made, non-standardized ICT solutions, the advantages of Setcor’s infrastructure management, and the technical characteristics of the available Setcor data centers. In addition, he described in detail the Setcor’s service portfolio (including IaaS, Backup as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service, Security as a Service, Setcor Private Cloud, and technical support through Setcor Support Center), a dedicated onboarding and ordering portal for OCRE 2024 Framework, and organisations in Europe that use Setcor services.
Presentations:
About OCRE 2024
The OCRE 2024 Framework was launched by GÉANT in February 2025. It is the third iteration of GÉANT’s flagship cloud frameworks and will be in place for a period of 5 years, until 2030. Resulting from a pan-European procurement established under the GN5-1 project and building on the successes of the previous frameworks, the OCRE 2024 Framework will enable tens of thousands of European R&E institutions and public institutions across 39 countries to procure innovative cloud services in an easy, compliant, and cost-effective way. All available cloud service offerings are listed in a comprehensive OCRE 2024 catalogue on the GÉANT Clouds website and can be filtered by national availability, preferred platforms and service providers.
To procure cloud services, please follow the OCRE 2024 Institution Guide to Using the Framework, available on: https://clouds.geant.org/resources/