As of 3 February 2025, the cloud-based digital service providers issuing cloud services for the European research and education community have changed. The GÉANT association, which manages the pan-European research network and through which the Restena Foundation can provide this service in Luxembourg, has negotiated and procured cloud based services from numerous suppliers in a public tender, the third one since 2016. Those are made available for National Research and Education Network (NREN) across Europe, including Luxembourg. Acting as the Luxembourg NREN, Restena offers its eligible institutions willing to adapt their IT resources to meet the changing requirements of their activity on an ad hoc basis to fully benefit of 7 such cloud infrastructures within its 'cloud - infrastructure as a service (Iaas)' service.

Reduced number of providers

The new framework called ‘OCRE 2024’ comes into force thanks to the European "Open Clouds for Research Environments" (OCRE) project aiming at accelerating cloud adoption in the European research community. It grants research and education institutions access to different cloud solutions offerings (Infrastructure, Software or Platform as a Service — IaaS, SaaS, PaaS…) within a range of vendors and service providers.

In Luxembourg, the numbers of available platforms have been reduced from 13 to 7 platforms. All of the 7 have renewed their commitment for the next five years and some will be available via various resellers:

1. Amazon AWS (via resellers Sparkle and SoftwareONE, instead of Rackspace),
2. CloudFerro,
3. Exoscale by VSHN AG,
4. Google Cloud (via reseller Sparkle, and now also via resellers SoftwareONE and Academic Software),
5. Ionos (via reseller Bechtle),
6. Microsoft Azure (via reseller Bechtle and now also via reseller SoftwareONE),
7. T-Systems.

The platforms Blue Safespring, CloudSigma, IBM, Oracle, Orange NL and Setco are therefore not available anymore for Luxembourg institutions.

The whole cloud suppliers catalogue for Luxembourg, is available on the OCRE 2024 catalogue.

Two major improvements

Thanks to that new framework, Luxembourg institutions can now benefit from some key improvements implemented by the GÉANT cloud team. They are:

• Enhanced Compliance: With a focus on sustainability, privacy, security, adherence to European laws and regulations and reporting.
• Improved Commercial Terms: Including better & minimum discounts, reduced egress costs, local billing and more extensive access to complimentary training and support resources.

As was the case until now, all supplier services are pre-tendered according to European regulation. Therefore, institutions do not need to launch a resource-intensive tendering process for these services. They just need to get in touch with the Restena Foundation, acting as the single and appointed point of contact for members of the research and education community in Luxembourg to access this specific offer.

All organisations connected to the RESTENA network (ie. research institutes, education and cultural institutions across Luxembourg) that are interested in using IaaS, PaaS or SaaS services to react to their needs – e.g. to punctually adapt their computing resources, to accelerate deployment works or event to focus on their user needs while leaving aside technical end resources are invited to contact cloud@restena.lu.