The topic of sovereignty took centre stage at the GÉANT Clouds meeting at TNC26 in Helsinki, Finland, on 12 June 2026. Attended by 67 participants from 30 countries, the session included presentations on the community’s work around a sovereign pan-European object storage infrastructure, a panel discussion on cloud sovereignty and the evolving role of NRENs in the changing landscape, as well as updates on the OCRE 2024 Framework. The interactive format contributed to a dynamic and fruitful discussion, while participants returned home with insights to carry into their future strategic planning and day-to-day service delivery decisions.
Towards a pan-European research storage infrastructure
The opening session centred on community efforts towards the development of a pan-European sovereign object infrastructure, one of the three strategic areas of service concept investment currently being developed by the GÉANT project’s clouds team, alongside a Digital Research Environment (DRE) and a Data Movement Infrastructure.
Jan Meijer (Sikt) opened with an introduction to the European object storage landscape from the perspective of European NRENs, covering people, countries, research organisations and infrastructures, policy initiatives. He argued that, with data and storage requirements now well understood, this community has a significant opportunity to de-fragment the storage landscape into a single pan-European object storage layer, leading to improved and more cost-efficient service delivery.
The vision is to establish a sovereign, coherent storage infrastructure for research at a pan-European level that can serve as a foundation for other services, ensure long-term sustainability, and earn the trust of data controllers. According to Bo Bai (DeiC), GÉANT and its community of NRENs are ideally positioned to deliver this vision, as they already address some of the main challenges faced by the proposed infrastructure, notably around federation, but also including identity and access management, procurement, governance, interconnection, and operations, while GÉANT’s sovereign network infrastructure is identified as a key enabling component. The proposed infrastructure would be designed using existing standards and components when possible and fostering convergence among providers.
Presentations then shifted towards the proposed architecture, planned roadmap and implementation. Kalle Happonen (CSC) explained how the initiative is currently in its initial stage, with focus on designing the infrastructure’s blueprint, identifying a core set of independent yet compatible provider sites, defining interoperability specifications, and running initial testing. In the second stage, higher level functions will be introduced, including cross-site functionality between sites and a proper service ecosystem relying on the object storage service. In the third stage, the aim will be to evolve this ecosystem into a federated service, also introducing contractual ties between sites and addressing the needed policy requirements.
The block closed with early findings from SAGE (Sovereign Architecture for Geo-distributed European Object Storage), one of the projects recently funded through the GN5-2 Above-the-Net Services Incubator, where partners CSC, DeiC, PCSS, and SURF worked on a feasibility study to verify key technical and operational aspects of the proposed pan-European object storage architecture. Maciej Brzeźniak (PCSS) presented the tests performed on usage of Ceph S3, selected as the most feature-complete open source S3 API implementation, and scenarios on cross-border replication between Poland and Finland, and in-country replication among multiple sites in Poland (in collaboration with the KMD4EOSC project).
NRENs interested in participating in service concept development around the proposed pan-European research storage infrastructure are encouraged to join the discussion via SIG-CISS, the GÉANT Special Interest Group on Cloud Interoperable Software Stacks.
Cloud sovereignty from the perspective of European NRENs
A panel with representatives of European NRENs discussed different approaches to sovereignty, varying national priorities and their influence on the landscape, common challenges and how to tackle them as a community. A recurring theme was the difficulty to pin down the discussion around sovereignty due to shifting interpretations of the term, even more so in an international context.
RENATER’s CEO Boris Dintrans took part in the panel, advocating for strengthened sovereignty across all NREN activities, beyond cloud and extending onto network, security, services, and software. The shift needs to start with political decisions, followed by technical implementation. In parallel, he highlighted the need to support local private companies that provide key strategic services to NRENs, enabling them to grow in the market.
While NRENs are registering increased use of cloud services from US hyperscalers, several initiatives are underway to identify European alternatives and enable institutions to access and make the best use of all options available on the market. Michel Wets (SURF) presented the example of the SURF Research Cloud, which enables Dutch institutions to quickly set up projects combining institutional infrastructures and capabilities with a wide range of solutions from both hyperscalers and European providers.
Multiple NRENs support a hybrid approach. Norbert Lovinger (CESNET) described how Czech universities can also choose CESNET’s own data storage solutions alongside commercial providers – an increasingly popular option with researchers who want to keep data within national borders. ASNET-AM’s CEO Hrachya Astsatryan noted that current priorities in Armenia are placed on building local infrastructure and on training domain-specific engineers to support facility usage. Jon Murua (Switch) emphasised the dual role of Switch around cloud services as provider and as adviser for Swiss universities, both on technical and legal aspects, while flagging the challenges of recovering costs and investments, and of matching the service levels offered by commercial providers.
OCRE 2024: reflections on sovereignty and global OCRE ambitions
The meeting closed with an update on the successful OCRE 2024 Framework, a little over a year after its launch. Garvan McFeeley (Asiera) traced how GÉANT’s collective procurement efforts have evolved since the first Cloud Framework in 2016, with a growing number of participating countries, a significant increase in institutions using the frameworks and in annual consumption.
The session presented a chance to reflect on the topic of sovereignty in the context of OCRE. The OCRE 2024 Framework currently includes a wide offering of European platforms alongside US hyperscalers, all delivered and supported locally by European providers. Regardless, challenges and questions around sovereignty remain, due to the complexity of the topic and of the changing landscape, where we see at the same time hyperscalers adapting to satisfy European requirements and European platforms expanding their ambitions to grow.
Finally, Michel Wets introduced a recent OCRE global feasibility study, launched towards the end of 2025, which assessed the possibility to scale the OCRE model to other world regions beyond Europe, initially involving Brazil, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the US. Early results are promising, and global engagement and work on gap analysis across regions will continue throughout 2026, with consolidated findings and decisions on the steps ahead expected for the end of 2026.
For more details about the meeting, view the presentation slides: https://tnc26.geant.org/programme/#Friday/all/s1049
