OCRE partner CERN has recently published an academic paper in EPJ Web Conf. Volume 245, 2020 (24th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2019)) entitled “Pre-Commercial Procurement: R&D as a Service for the European Open Science Cloud” which outlines their experience in the procurement of Cloud Services from various projects including OCRE.
The paper outlines how CERN, in collaboration with leading European research institutes, has launched several projects to address the fact that economic and contractual aspects linked to the use of commercial cloud services are often overlooked in research environments in Europe, preventing researchers from reaping the full benefits of these services. These projects, among which is OCRE, have revealed key lessons in procuring commercial cloud resources for research environments in Europe. These lessons could also help shape the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
The Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE), aims to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community, by bringing together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organisations and the research and education community, through ready-to-use service agreements and €9.5 million in adoption funding. Cloud-based services offer the European research community a wealth of powerful tools, but for many researchers, these are currently out of reach, with suitable services difficult to find and select. OCRE addresses this by running pan-European tenders and establishing framework agreements with cloud and earth observation service providers that meet the specific requirements of the research community, saving institutions the time-consuming and complex process of doing this themselves.
You can access and download the paper here.