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Revolgy offers Google Cloud Solutions for European Research and Education Institutes

February 22, 2021

Great news ahead for all education and research institutions who are ready to take a step forward and use the cloud to its full potential. Revolgy can now officially help you to accelerate the speed of processing huge data sets, improve collaboration through shared tools and data storage with cloud computing. We won the OCRE tender as cloud services provider and have been officially selected within the GÉANT IAAS+ Framework Agreement for offering Google Cloud Solutions, as Original Infrastructure Provider (OIP) for all Research and Education Institutes in Czech Republic, Estonia and Serbia.

Emma Fish, Google for Education Head of Business Development talks about more advantages of OCRE Framework on the official Google Cloud Blog: “Cloud computing also presents administrative hurdles in a complex legal and regulatory environment.

The OCRE framework aims to encourage adoption of cloud services and ease the transition to the cloud with benefits like:

Streamlined procurement process with ready-made agreements that can be tailored to each institution’s needs
Up-to-date compliance requirements and built-in data protections
Special discount pricing and funding opportunities”

Researchers can also benefit from Revolgy services such as dedicated onboarding sessions for Google Cloud Project, additional discounts, 24/7 support services with dedicated support channels and variety of support packages, access to Senior Certified Experts and Engineers working closely with the Google Products teams. From a technical point of view there are also multiple APIs dedicated to research activities such as Healthcare or Life Sciences.

“We are really proud to be part of this initiative. We strongly believe that education and technology should go hand in hand. We worked hard together with the GÉANT as coordinator and Google Cloud team to make Google Cloud technologies accessible to a legally solid framework agreement and make the Public Cloud accessible to all the research and education institutions.”

Vlad Birsan, Country Manager at Revolgy

What is OCRE?

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union that aims to enable and facilitate research institutions to use commercial digital services in a safe and easy manner. The Consortium delivering the project includes GÉANT (coordinator), CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT.

The OCRE project announced the award of framework agreements that will ease access to commercial cloud services for researchers and research institutions in 40 European countries. Researchers will be able to benefit from 27 different commercial cloud-based platforms. Although not every platform is available in every country, each country has eight or more platforms to choose from.

OCRE’s Cloud Catalogue lists all the compliant digital services providers for every participating EU nation, as well as contacts at local National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) to fast-track cloud adoption. As part of the OCRE framework Revolgy have been chosen as one of the partners to distribute Google Cloud solutions to GÉANT’s member institutions in their move to the cloud.

How to use the OCRE catalog?

They made it easy to find what is available in each country. When entering into the catalogue, the user encounters a map of Europe. A country's individual catalogue of available services is accessed by simply clicking on that country. Each entry includes a link to detailed information about the platform and a contact email address which can be used to request a quote.

The OCRE Cloud Framework and OCRE Cloud Catalogue will support state-of-the-art research and explore new ways forward for procuring, funding and using in-demand digital solutions while benefiting from volume discounts. In short, this allows research institutions to avoid bureaucratic barriers that prevent researchers from easy access to these cloud services.

All services are Standard Framework Agreement compliant with EU data security and privacy regulations. All cloud platforms are sourced through the OCRE IaaS+ Tender and are available through the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in the OCRE Cloud Catalogue.