The GÉANT Innovation Programme is excited to announce the award of its entire 2025 fund to the development of a GÉANT Digital Research Environment (DRE) and of a series of related Proofs of Concept. Based on the SURF Research Cloud, this digital platform will allow researchers and research organisations within NREN communities to build virtual research environments, get access to national and regional infrastructure and digital services, and collaborate on projects across teams and institutions in different countries.
The initiative will see the collaboration of SURF and GÉANT, with SURF leading technical developments and support to NRENs and GÉANT overseeing the project’s coordination. Additionally, four NRENs – SUNET, Switch, HEAnet, Sikt – will contribute to the initiative by configuring Proofs of Concept to establish national tenancies of the GÉANT DRE, add their services and resources to the ecosystem, and allocate them to local research projects.
The GÉANT Innovation Programme’s decision to fund a broader, ambitious project for its 2025 edition, rather than multiple smaller proposals, reflects the programme’s commitment to supporting innovative ideas with the potential to deliver strategic impact and digital transformation to the entire R&E community. Furthermore, narrowing the focus on a single award for this year gave the Innovation Programme team ample time to develop a new timeline and approach for the 2026 edition, which is intended to launch in the fall of 2025.
This initiative is fully aligned with the current GÉANT community strategy for ‘above-the-net services’, focused on the collaborative development of a set of services in support of the European R&E community by the NRENs.
“GÉANT has a mandate to promote co-creation through collaboration within its association of NRENs. This enables all NRENs to share their innovative open-source developments and contribute towards the value that the GÉANT community adds to the entire European R&E community.” – Dave Heyns, GÉANT.
An ambitious project to support the whole research data lifecycle
On top of the network, security, and trust and identity services offered by GÉANT and the NRENs, researchers are extensively using cloud-based services throughout the research data lifecycle. Offered both by GÉANT, NRENs, research infrastructures, and R&E institutions, or by commercial providers, these services include data storage and management, computational and HPC resources, tools for data analysis, data visualisation, and machine learning, collaboration tools, secure file transfer, data publishing and preservation services, electronic lab notebooks, to name a few. However, the current ecosystem of services remains fragmented, varied, and not fully integrated.
The GÉANT DRE initiative will allow GÉANT and its member NRENs to facilitate the consumption of a broad and standardised suite of hybrid services – both community and commercial cloud-based – in a federated environment, and underpinned by our core networks, security, and authentication services. The platform aims to enable access to- and management of digital services via researcher identity authentication, as well as optimisation and monitoring of service consumption and collaboration on research projects based on allocation defined within a research project ‘wallet’.
Designed with a key focus on digital sovereignty and institutional autonomy, the GÉANT DRE aims to support both hosting in a regional or ‘multi-tenant mode’ by GÉANT or by an NREN, or deployment at a national level, in a single-tenant mode. Current and planned developments are also placing particular consideration on enablement of open science and FAIR sharing of research data, as well as interoperability with the EOSC EU Node, thus also supporting the involvement of NRENs as EOSC national nodes.
Developing the GÉANT DRE
The GÉANT DRE initiative started with a pilot project in November 2024, also funded by the GÉANT Innovation Programme with an initial award of EUR 50,000. This allowed SURF to kick-start the preparatory work, to prove the SURF Research Cloud’s multi-tenancy capabilities across all functional elements, to align the SURF Research Access Management (SRAM) platform with MyAccessId and with the EOSC EU node AAI, and finally to demonstrate interoperability with the EOSC EU node.
The recent award of EUR 230,000 for this year’s edition of the GÉANT Innovation Programme will cover further developments throughout 2025, allowing SURF to support the configuration and testing of NREN tenancies on the GÉANT DRE, and Proofs of Concept for participating NRENs to use the GÉANT DRE for the distribution of both local and regional services to their local research constituencies.
During the first ongoing project sprint, SURF is currently assessing the development needed for full platform multi-tenancy, progressing the work on interoperability with the EOSC EU Node, and starting to guide participating NRENs through the process of tenancy configuration, services registration, engagement of institutions and projects, and wallet building.
“The SURF Research Cloud team is pleased to see our solution being adopted by other NRENs, underscoring its value in building trusted, cross-border research infrastructures. This momentum reflects the growing importance of open-source collaboration, and we look forward to advancing this vision further in partnership with EOSC.” – Ivar Janmaat, SURF.
NREN Proofs of Concept
Throughout 2025, four other NRENs will join the initiative, contributing with their own funding to establish Proof of Concept tenancies on the GÉANT DRE, in a progressive series of sprint cycles. Leading the way, the Swedish NREN SUNET is now at work to configure its tenancy during the first half of the year, instantiating infrastructure and applications in SUNET-operated datacentres, as well as connections to the SUNET Drive storage and file sharing service. This first Proof of Concept will be demonstrated at TNC25, during the Community Hub session “Beyond the Net: Enabling Research Collaboration” on Wednesday 11 June, from 09:00 to 10:30 BST.
Development sprints throughout the second half of the year will then involve the Swiss NREN Switch, seeking to onboard services within the Switch cloud portfolio and particularly the Switch Drive, the Irish NREN HEAnet, looking at an integration of national and institutional computing and storage services, and the Norwegian NREN Sikt, particularly seeking to distribute through the GÉANT DRE the data centre services from the national HPC infrastructure SIGMA2, and access to HPC resources and storage solutions. All involved NRENs will share their experiences with the GÉANT DRE towards the end of the project.
With this first set of Proofs of Concept the project aims to highlight the value of the GÉANT DRE’s service distribution mechanism and pave the way for further onboarding of NRENs within the GÉANT community. In line with this, the project reserved a small percentage of its funding to support the development of an additional Proof of Concept involving an emerging or less resourced NREN, for the configuration of a national tenancy and for the distribution of a single service focused on open science and supported either by the NREN or by one of its member institutions. The project team will share more details about this opportunity and the evaluation process ahead of SUNET’s Proof of Concept at TNC25 and will identify potential participants based on the community response to the demonstration.
About the GÉANT Innovation Programme
Launched in February 2021, the GÉANT Innovation Programme has funded various projects covering a range of thematic areas, including Network and Network Technologies, Above the Net, Trust and Identity, Security, and Digital Health. The GÉANT Innovation Programme facilitates the opportunity to test new ideas and make a real difference in advancing not only technology, but also business practices, human capital, and sustainability for, and by, the GÉANT community. Examples of previous innovation developed within the GÉANT community include widely adopted services, such as eduroam, eduVPN, and eduMEET.
