Research Infrastructures & NRENs Requirements for Commodity Cloud Services

Leveraging lessons learned on previous activities to access commercial cloud services, CERN is leading the task “requirements collection for commodity cloud services” in the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project. In a two-fold activity, CERN built on the work performed during the award-winning HNSciCloud project, introducing voucher schemes to research, collaborating with the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) and Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), in order to collect requirements for individual researchers (OCRE Wave 1). The second activity relates to the definition of the requirements for the establishment of a “Buyers Group” model, derived from Pre-Commercial Procurement exercises, where a lead buyer organisation aggregates demand and financial pre-commitments, acting on behalf of a set of organisations or a community. These activities also build on the results of a demand-side market research to understand the needs and level of demand for digital services for the research community, in the context of the EOSC. The market analysis is documented in the EOSC-hub D12.1 deliverable “Procurement requirements and demand assessment”.

The combination of these activities contributed to the establishment of the baseline for requirement collection both for Individual Organisations (OCRE Wave 2) and the aggregation model based on Buyers Groups (OCRE Wave 3). This document will be complemented by a quantitative analysis of the requirements presented.