Story originally published by Belnet in October 2025
The transition to the Cloud has become a strategic priority for academic institutions. Elena Fascilla, Director of IT Services at the University of Mons in Belgium has led this transformation at her institution. Sharing her experience with the Belgian NREN Belnet, she explained why they decided to adopt cloud services through the OCRE framework agreement, the benefits they have gained, and the improvements she would like to see in the future.
“At the University of Mons, we started exploring Cloud services when our need for flexibility and agility became critical. We needed to quickly deploy experimental environments for research and teaching. Our on-premises infrastructure had reached its limits, especially in terms of scalability, resilience, and maintenance costs, which prompted us to look for more modern solutions.
Today, we continue to use Azure services via the old OCRE framework agreement, as the new agreement is still in the process of being validated by our procurement department.
For me, one of the main advantages of the OCRE framework agreement is the simplified procurement procedure: there is no need to launch a complex public tender process since suppliers have already been pre-selected. We also benefit from negotiated pricing that is competitive for the academic and research sector, while having the assurance of compliance with European regulations, such as GDPR. Interoperability with research standards, such as federated authentication via eduGAIN or integration with EOSC, is another significant advantage.
Our Cloud services must meet strict requirements:
- Performance: low latency, high bandwidth, access to GPUs for AI projects.
- Security: GDPR compliance, data isolation, federated authentication, logging.
- Scalability: ability to quickly scale up during intensive computing campaigns.
- Resilience and availability: SLAs of at least 99.9%.
I strongly recommend the use of GÉANT Cloud Framework agreements like OCRE to other R&E organizations. The framework offers considerable administrative savings, ensures reliable suppliers, and is an excellent way to align practices with European research policies. It is particularly relevant for medium-sized institutions that do not have a large procurement or legal department.
Looking ahead, I would like to see the creation of a federated catalogue with a cost comparison tool, to make institutional choices even easier and more transparent.”
