Sovereign European cloud for research and education

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is GÉANT's cloud procurement framework for European research and education. VSHN and Exoscale participate in the OCRE 2024 framework, GÉANT's third generation, which started on 3 February 2025 and runs for about five years. It lets eligible institutions acquire vetted commercial cloud services quickly and compliantly, without running their own lengthy public tender.

Research and education institutions across the 39 OCRE-eligible countries can purchase VSHN and Exoscale services through OCRE 2024. We publish a country guide for each one, naming 32,476 institutions between them, organized in three groups. Group A covers NREN members, except government bodies without a research or education role. Group B covers research and education institutions outside the NREN, such as university medical centers, libraries, museums, and private universities. Group C covers non-profit bodies affiliated with the NREN without a research or education focus, such as government bodies. The framework's data egress waiver covers Groups A and B, not Group C. In Switzerland, institutions access the framework through SWITCH.

VSHN is ranked number one for Exoscale in all countries it serves, including Switzerland. The offering spans Infrastructure as a Service (compute, storage, GPU, networking), Container and Platform services (Exoscale SKS, VSHN Managed OpenShift, APPUiO), and Software and managed applications.

Exoscale is the European cloud provider whose infrastructure underpins the offering, with data centers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Croatia, and Bulgaria. Exoscale delivers the compute, storage, GPU, Kubernetes (SKS), and DBaaS layers, while VSHN handles managed operations, platform services, and customer support across most of Europe.

VSHN and Exoscale are Swiss and European companies with no US parent company, so customer data is not subject to the US CLOUD Act. This addresses the Schrems II concerns that arise when research data leaves European jurisdiction, and Exoscale offers a guaranteed data location so you always know where your workloads run.

VSHN and Exoscale both hold ISO 27001. Exoscale also holds ISO 27018 for personal data in the cloud, and VSHN provides an ISAE 3402 Type II report; a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreement is provided free of charge. These controls already serve regulated sectors including government, banking, healthcare, and education, easing institutional procurement and data-protection review.

VSHN operates managed services 24/7, including automated backups, monitoring, and managed updates. Managed offerings come with service level agreements up to 99.99% availability. For self-managed Exoscale infrastructure you keep full control, and you can add VSHN AppOps for operations support on top of your own deployments.

Through the OCRE 2024 framework there is no minimum order quantity, no turnover commitment, and no required contract length. Services are billed hourly and invoiced monthly in EUR or CHF, with framework discounts on Exoscale services. Exoscale waives all data egress charges to GÉANT and connected NRENs (the framework requires only 15% waiver, but Exoscale provides 100%). VSHN provides written cost estimates in EUR or CHF on request.

OCRE eliminates the 6 to 18 months a standalone public tender typically takes. VSHN is ranked number one for Exoscale in all countries it serves, so institutions can use the cascade method (direct award) and place an order without a competition round. For projects under EUR 75,000, a desktop mini-competition can be completed via spreadsheet using GÉANT's pre-scored evaluations. In emergency scenarios such as disaster recovery or ransomware, call-off can be completed in as little as two working days.

Yes. Exoscale offers GPU instances for AI training, inference, and HPC workloads, all procurable through the OCRE 2024 framework. VSHN adds managed Kubernetes for ML pipeline orchestration and managed databases for feature stores and experiment tracking. Your data stays in European data centers under Swiss and EU jurisdiction, which matters for research projects handling sensitive or personal datasets where hyperscaler AI services would raise Schrems II concerns.

OCRE procures cloud services rather than models, so there is no framework model catalogue. Exoscale Dedicated Inference runs any model on Hugging Face, public, gated or private, plus your own weights, as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint on European GPUs: Apertus, Llama, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma and Whisper all deploy the same way. Billing is per GPU-second with scale-to-zero and a 99.95% availability SLA. What limits the choice is GPU memory in your zone, not an approval list. Closed models such as GPT-4, Claude and Gemini are not available on this route. Exoscale Managed Inference, a curated per-token catalogue, is announced with the waitlist open and no published model list yet.

Renewable supply is per zone, so the figure that matters is the one for the zone you deploy in: 100% renewable in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, 91% in Zagreb, 75% in Sofia, and around 90% across the estate. GPU servers use 100% liquid cooling that cuts power consumption by 50% and recovers 98% of waste heat. Exoscale provides CloudAssess, an automated monthly Life Cycle Assessment built on the ADEME cloud sustainability standard, giving your institution verified environmental impact data for CSRD reports and research grant sustainability requirements. For institutions with 1000 or more employees, CSRD mandates reporting on the environmental footprint of cloud services. CloudAssess delivers that data without manual effort.

You do not have to migrate everything. VSHN and Exoscale through OCRE work well alongside existing hyperscaler contracts. Many institutions use Exoscale specifically for sovereignty-sensitive workloads (research data subject to GDPR, patient data, or grant-funded projects requiring European data residency) while keeping non-sensitive workloads elsewhere. OCRE has no minimum order quantity and no turnover commitment, so you can start with a single project and expand at your own pace.

Contact VSHN through the form below describing your institution and intended workloads, and we will provide more information and a trial voucher so you can evaluate the services. Eligible institutions sign a master contract, receive admin accounts, and then self-serve through the web console, API, Terraform, and Ansible to create projects and manage users.

One. Ordering Exoscale cloud through VSHN's OCRE 2024 catalogue entry means the infrastructure and the managed operations are ordered from and invoiced by the same supplier under the framework, in EUR or CHF, with no minimum quantity and no turnover commitment. For an institution that would otherwise run a tender to buy two things that belong together, that is most of the value of a framework award.