GÉANT: Your gateway to deliver to 50 million users in the European R&E community

GÉANT is uniquely capable of helping vendors deliver cloud services to the European research and education community. This community consists of 10,000 institutions and 50 million users, who communicate and collaborate online on a daily basis, often in cross-organisational teams. Cloud services are vital to their work and research collaborations.

GÉANT is here to help you develop the most compelling and suitable cloud services by overcoming the obstacles that the organisational, technical and financial structures of research and education organisations often present.

As the designated internet service provider for the pan-European research and education community, GÉANT is interested in expanding our service portfolio to include a wide range of innovative services. This type of joint procurement is not possible through your standard purchase processes.

GÉANT can help you:

  • Close EU-compliant contracts that are ready-to-use, including GDPR, the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation.
  • Technically connect you to the research and education institutions, via our secure single sign-on and high-speed network infrastructure.
  • Promote your service via our direct access and cooperation with key decision-makers at institutions.

Major vendors have already joined our marketplace, and via our gateway, deliver to 50 million higher education and research users in 40 countries.

GÉANT has prepared indicative cloud requirements that highlights the appropriate right conditions of use vendors must comply with to engage with the NREN community and be included in the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue.

By aggregating demand across the community and negotiating integrated brokerage, framework contracts, terms and conditions of use, NRENs and vendors can maximise benefits.

Federated AAI via eduGAIN

eduGAIN interconnects research and education identity federations and enables the trustworthy exchange of information between service providers and research and education institutions or other identity providers. This means simpler access to third party cloud services that benefit collaboration in the research and education community. eduGAIN provides access to online services that students, researchers and educators need while minimising the number of accounts users and service providers have to manage - reducing costs, complexity and security risks. It gives service providers access to a large pool of users internationally, and allows users to access resources of peer institutions or commercial or cloud services using their one trusted identity.

The GÉANT Cloud Activity has hosted a webinar to provide a technical overview of SAML and eduGAIN. The aim is to assist Cloud providers understand the technical concepts in order to help them plan and implement tasks to enable their cloud portal for SAML and eduGAIN. Go to the showcase/webinar.

Peering with GÉANT

By network peerings with GÉANT, cloud service providers and the NRENs deliver a high quality service in terms of performance, security and end-to-end service assurance. Peerings also make it possible to minimize or remove the data transport related costs that have been a barrier to the adoption of cloud services by research and education institutions.

Our job is to get these services into the hands of users in the most straightforward way possible through joint cloud brokerage, procurement, integration and adoption efforts – as a delivery gateway to the research and education community.


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