MS7.1.1: Cloud Assessment Document

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MS7.1.1 Cloud Assessment Document

Questionnaire Response Summary

August 2013

© DANTE on behalf of the GN3plus project.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007–

2013) under Grant Agreement No. 605243 (GN3plus).

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Introduction

In GÉANT and the GN3plus project, the European National Research and Education Networks (NREN)

collaborate on cloud services. Through this collaboration, the NRENs want to bring cloud services to their users,

with the right conditions of use. To underpin and focus on these joint efforts, the GÉANT cloud services team

(the Support to clouds Service Activity in GN3plus), conducted a survey amongst the NRENs in the GÉANT

community in July 2013.

The goal of this questionnaire was to find out:

NRENs’ perception of clouds.

Which cloud components NRENs have in place and are planning to consume and produce.

How NRENs can collaborate on clouds through GN3plus, in the Support to Clouds activity (SA7).

Structure of this document

The main outcomes of the study are presented in the following Summary and Conclusions chapter. This section

summarises the results of the questionnaire and highlights the survey’s main findings, which will eventually serve

to formulate a cloud strategy for joint NREN activities at a European level, and also used to inform NRENs’ own

cloud strategies.

More detailed information about the respondents’ answers is presented in four main categories, which follow the

same structure as the questionnaire:

Motivation

Offering

Standards

Collaboration in GÉANT and other NRENs.

Each question is presented with an accompanying graph and a few lines of descriptive text detailing the replies.

Responding NRENs

In early July 2013, the questionnaire was circulated among GN3plus Assembly representatives. For some

NRENs, a selected individual, such as the ‘Cloud Coordinator’, was also invited to fill in the questionnaire on

behalf of his/her NREN. To ensure respondents were in relevant roles, recipients were asked to forward the

questionnaire to the relevant person(s) in their own organisation. To simplify the gathering of input for all question

types (strategic, organisational and technical), the full list of questions was made available on the GÉANT website,

and it was possible for respondents to save, and later resume, a partially completed questionnaire.

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Milestone MS94_MS7 1_1 Questionnaire Response Summary

Out of the 37 NRENs contacted, the GÉANT Cloud Services Team received a total of 27 questionnaires from 23

NRENs. Four NRENs responded twice, but this is not believed to have a large impact on the results of the

questionnaire.

Summary and conclusions

The questionnaire had a high response rate (27 respondents from 23 NRENs), reflecting the relevance of cloud

services for the NRENs. This was further emphasised by the fact that two-thirds (66%) of the respondents indicate

that cloud services have had an impact on their organisation, with 40% stating this impact as “high to very high”.

NRENs find cloud services appealing because of their flexibility:

They allow NRENs to offer and use new services at a faster pace (agility).

Cloud services can be easily scaled (elasticity).

Most cloud services are easy to use.

The majority of the NRENs (80%) are already “working on clouds”, with half of the respondents doing this through

one or more specific ‘cloud teams’ within their organisation. However, only four NRENs are dealing with clouds

in a well-structured manner, with a clear underlying strategy. Most NRENs are still in a start-up phase for their

cloud efforts, which indicates opportunities for joint activities. The timing for GN3plus SA7 Support to Clouds

seems to be right, at a time when both NRENs and their users are making important decisions.

Looking at the demand side of cloud services, the results of the survey indicate that users and decision makers

are asking NRENs about cloud services demonstrating an urgency to deliver services. There are a number of

things that NRENs need to establish to fulfil this demand.

Almost all NRENS believe they should provide and operate their own cloud services (22 responses). The

survey indicates that NRENs are willing to share components and offer services provided by other NRENs

(ranging from a third to a half, depending on the type of service).

About half of the responding NRENs want to broker cloud services (from commercial providers). A total

of 19% of the respondents are already offering one or more services.

Half of the respondents want to integrate cloud services.

SA7 will facilitate and coordinate collaborative efforts between NRENs and between GÉANT and the NRENs

(such as roadmaps and planning and resource sharing to facilitate mutual benefits). It is clear that there are also

opportunities to more closely align groups of NRENs (using the results of the questionnaire).

The most attractive services for the research and education community, according to the respondents, are:

Instantiate individual computing platforms

File storage: tools for file sharing, backup and archiving

Web conferencing.

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The survey shows the main target group for these cloud offerings are the institutions (IT departments of

universities). A little over half of the respondents also indicated their intent to offer services directly to individual

users.

With regard to cloud services being offered by NRENs, it is anticipated that NRENs will provide such services

during the next 12 months. Nearly 80% of respondents intend to offer Iaas/PasS and STaaS (including testing

and production-level services).

The main concerns and requirements for cloud services, for NRENs and their communities are:

Security, privacy and confidentiality issues

Support for identity federations

Vendor lock-in, lack of control and interoperability through standards (a concern for NRENs, but less for

end-users according to the respondents)

Reliability, availability, data location and replication

More choice / greater number of services

The sustainability of NREN cloud offerings.

It is also relevant that the respondents indicated that NRENs and their communities are less concerned about

“fading of internal competencies” and the financial aspect of “substituting capex with opex”.

The NRENs clearly want to collaborate with the GÉANT community on cloud knowledge sharing, business

models, standards, security (trust, data protection), procurement and brokering, AAI integration and operations.

There is less interest in sharing information about the promotion of cloud services and cloud application

development.

There is also a realisation that an NREN’s failure to provide or facilitate the use of cloud services to their users

could either result in users drifting into fragmented islands of incompatible services that may not have a

sustainable future or negatively impact an NREN’s relevance and diminish the associated benefits to the user

communities.

NRENs would like to get involved in cloud activities, however, some of the constraints they face include: a

shortage of resources, both personnel / expertise, and financial limitations. Funding agencies are perceived as

having a rather low level of readiness and demand for cloud services. This might indicate a need to engage more

closely with these organisations.

The SA7 team will use the outcomes of this questionnaire (through further analyses, where needed), to drive and

focus the NREN collaboration on clouds and the SA7 work packages. It will also provide direct input for defining

a cloud strategy for GÉANT and the NRENs (which is an objective for SA7 Task 1). At the GÉANT 2013

Symposium, the SA7 Task 1 team will organise a session to discuss the results of the cloud questionnaire and

propose follow-up actions (through several possible scenarios).

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Motivation

i1. The impact of cloud computing on my organisation is:

Figure 1: Question i1 results

40% of the respondents indicate that cloud computing has / will have a high or very high impact on their

organisations.

26% of the respondents state cloud computing will have an average impact on their organisations

22% indicate cloud services have a minimal impact on their organisations.

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i2. My organisation is working on clouds:


Only 20% of the respondents have not worked on cloud projects, and only four respondents (15%) are working

inside a clearly defined strategy. In the vast majority (65%) of cases, cloud activity may be termed “spotty”.

i3. Are there one or more specific groups within your organisation dealing with cloud

matters?

NRENs’ responses to this question are evenly split between those who do have such cloud groups (13 cases)

and those who don’t (14 cases, sum of “no”, “not yet” and “no answer”).

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i4. What role(s) do you think are appropriate for your NREN in the context of a cloud

offering?

Figure 4: Question i4 Results

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

NRENs with dedicated cloud groups NRENs without dedicated cloud groups

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Nearly all of the surveyed NRENs believe that they should operate cloud services of their own. About half want

to broker other services, and half want to integrate cloud services. Moreover, 11 NRENs stated that they would

like to both provide AND broker services, and 10 NRENs state they want to both broker AND integrate services.

i5. Are you currently offering ‘cloud’ services?

Responses to this and the following question needed some adjustment to ensure consistency, for example, a cloud storage service was considered Software-aaS by some, but others considered it as Storage-aaS. Main changes consisted in:

filesender, owncloud: moved to St-aaS

IdP in cloud, Liferay: moved to PaaS

VoIP, mail, scientific repositories: moved to SaaS

Figure 5: Question i5 results: present services

i6. Do you plan to offer new or additional cloud services over coming 12 months?

A better understanding of the way that NRENs are going to evolve their cloud services can be obtained by

comparing NRENs’ current service status (see question i5) to Figure 6, obtained by merging [i5] and [i6] answers

and further simplifying the information by combining alpha and beta services into one column.

The number of NRENs which provided any answers to [i5] or [i6] is equal to 23.

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Figure 6: Question i6 results: services status, as expected in 12 months

The comparison shows that, in one year from now:

The offer of IaaS and PaaS, both in terms of production and alpha/beta, services will double: 19 NRENs

(~80%) will provide IaaS and/or PaaS, either for tests or production.

Production SaaS will remain stable, but nearly 40% of respondents (up from ~20%) intend to start

providing some kind of alpha/beta service: in total, 13 NRENs (~50%) will provide SaaS of any kind.

The offer of STaaS will grow considerably, especially for production services. A total of 18 NRENs will

provide these kind of services.

The offer of NaaS will more than double, but the numbers here are smaller. A total of 9 NRENs will provide

NaaS services of any kind.

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i7. In case you are neither offering nor planning to offer any cloud service, can you

please elaborate on the reason why?


Multiple answers to this question were allowed. A total of 12 NRENs replied to this question.

The majority (~75%) of NRENs seems to be willing to get involved in cloud activity, but is constrained by

lack/shortage of resources (human and financial).

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i8. Please estimate how end-users, decision makers and funding bodies in your

country look towards cloud services (1=least, 5=most) in terms of their awareness (do

they know about the cloud) their readiness (are the able to start using the cloud) their

demand (how much are they asking for it).

Figure 8: Question i8 results: Awareness / readiness / demand

This question’s unit of measurement is the number of NRENs. “Good” and “very good” responses were counted

as “good”, and “poor”, “very poor”, and “no answer” responses counted as “poor”.

End Users exhibit the most even profiles.

Decision Makers are thought to be very aware of the cloud, but are somewhat less ready to adopt it and

also a bit weak in terms of their demand for cloud services This is not surprising, as it is possible that

decision makers would probably focus on functionalities provided or enabled by a technology, regardless

of its name (grid, cloud, etc.)

Funding Agencies are perceived as having more or less the same degree of awareness as End Users,

although with a much lower level of readiness and demand.

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i9. What kind of cloud services and tools are, in your estimate, most attractive (in a

range of 1 to 5, where 1=least, 5=most) for a research and education community in

your NREN?


Respondents reported that the most attractive services (for the R&E community), as shown in Figure 9 are those

related to data storage (file sharing, disaster recovery, archiving) and IaaS/PaaS, followed by “collaboration tools”

at large, in which category we may include also “Web conferencing” and “eLearning”.

Attractiveness of cloud database services (“data/metadata services”) and of the availability of scientific software

(both commercial and Open Source), is somewhat lower. In these cases, however, bias in an NREN’s perceived

attractiveness of such services, may have been caused by a number of factors, such as the huge variety of

available products (relational/NoSQL databases, statistical/mathematical software, etc.), licensing issues (for

commercial software), or the need to adapt or restructure workflows and applications (when moving from a

relational to a NoSQL database). It is also important to note that the NREN’s perceived attractiveness is often

based on the number of requests it receives from organisations, and that these organisations may have had

interest in data/metadata services that was not expressed to NRENs.

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i10. What is / will be the main customer / target group of your cloud offering?


Multiple answers were accepted in response to this question.

Only two NRENs considered “Other NRENs” as their main target group, while nearly all of the respondents

indicated “Institutions, as resource consumers”. Interestingly, nearly half of all respondents integrate/will integrate

resources provided by Institutions, and a bit more than half of the respondents deal/will deal directly with

“Individual Users”.

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i11. What is / was / will be the main motivation for your cloud offering?


More than one answer was allowed in response to this question. For “Other”, there was mention of provisioning of new services (2), of the opportunity of cost reduction, and of outsourcing within the community. From the graph, it appears that the main drivers were:

NREN-centric: the possibility to offer personalised environment to different groups of users (bars 5 and

6), and the opportunity to capitalise on previous investments (bars 1 and 2).

User-centric: due to users’ demand (nearly 50% respondents).

i12. Which user communities expressed greater interest in (or significantly

contributed to your decision to provide) your cloud offering?

From the 15 replies to this question, it is not surprising that most respondents stated the strongest demand came

from IT departments or more generally, “universities”. Two of the respondents explicitly mentioned primary and

high schools, and a few indicated professors/students, but it is likely that most probably meant universities. One

NREN mentioned “Health”.

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i13. What requirements were expressed, what you are addressing now, what you will

address over coming 12 months?

Figure 42: Question i13 results: Requirements expressed / matched

The graph in Figure 12 shows in red the percentage of questionnaires stating users’ expressed interest in a given

cloud feature (the total of “expressed” plus “don’t care” replies). The percentage of questionnaires stating they

are currently (or will be over 12 months) matching the expressed need (the total of ‘expressed and matching’ plus

‘expressed and will match’) is in blue, and the normalised number of questionnaires stating anything about the

given cloud feature (responses showing both user interest and matching need) is shown by the green line.

i14. If you received any requests for further requirements please describe them here

Two comments were added to the responses for this question:

Comment 1 asked about the possibility to create groups involving users outside the NREN community

(e.g. foreign researchers, non-academic institutions, etc.).

Comment 2 asked about the possibility to offer greater choice to users, through a multi-vendor cloud

strategy that will avoid vendor lock-in.

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i15. What aspects of the cloud do you, as an NREN, find most appealing about cloud

services?


i16. What are (if any) the biggest threats perceived by your end users and by your

organisation?

The list of perceived threats to NRENs is shown in the following table:

Threat ID Threat Description

1 Vendor Lock-in

2 Evolution and Incompatibility of Standards

3 Security and Privacy

4 Reliability

5 Sustainability of NREN cloud offering

6 Lack of control

7 Data location (storage and processing)

8 Data Portability

9 Fading of internal competencies

10 Substitute capex with opex

Figure 14 shows a summary of all replies. Values on the X axis correspond to ThreatID, as described in above

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table. The size of the balloon is proportional to the number of replies. A missing answer was interpreted as “Not

Worried”.

Figure 64: Question i16 results: NREN worries

i17. If you (as a NREN) are concerned about any other possible threats, please

describe them here

The few (5) replies to this question mentioned funding and out-of-control increase of costs, new services from

the large US providers, and lack of true open standards (namely in IaaS and PaaS).

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i18. What are the biggest threats of not providing or facilitating the usage of the cloud

services?


The two “Other” comments to this question mentioned funding and the loss of privacy, and increased future costs.

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Offering

o1. What AAI mechanisms does your NREN have in place?

Figure 86: Question o1 results

Figure 97: Question o1 results: Support for AA1

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41% (11 answers) responded they are using Shibboleth as an AAI mechanism.

37% (10 answers) responded they are using SAML 2.

33% (9 answers) of the respondents are using eduGAIN.

22% (6 answers) are not using AAI mechanisms, but will do so over the coming year.

14% (4 answers) responded their NREN is not using / offering AAI mechanisms, and are not planning to

do so on the coming year.

There were no answers for other AAI mechanisms.

It is worth noting that more than 75% of the respondents (18 answers) are using some kind of AAI mechanism.

o2. Are you currently using services provided by another NREN?


70% (19 answers) responded that they are not using services provided by another NREN.

15% (4 answers) responded they are in fact using services provided by another NREN.

15% (4 answers) gave no answer.

There were two comments for this question:

One comment was about the use of the TCS e-science portal, although, arguably, that portal or

associated services are not cloud services.

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Another comment was about the use of GreenQlod through the NORDUnet network. GreenQloud, an

IaaS cloud service is associated with an initiative by the NREN SURFnet.

.

The cross-community / network use of cloud services is not yet highly developed.

o3. Provided they met your NRENs' requirements, would you be interested in using

cloud services offered by another NREN?


For the cloud service model “Infrastructure-as-a-Service”: 48% (13 answers) responded that yes, they

would be interested in using cloud services offered by another NREN, provided that the necessary

requirements would be met.

For “Storage-as-a-Service”: 44% (12 answers) responded that yes, on the same conditions.

For “Platform-as-a-Service”: 37% (10 answers) responded that yes, on the same conditions

For “Software-as-a-Service”: 33% (9 answers) responded that yes, on the same conditions.

For “Network-as-a-Service”: 33% (9 answers) responded that yes, on the same conditions.

There was one "other" answer, with a negative reply, that is to say, not interested in using cloud

services offered by another NREN, even if requirements would be met.

It's worth noting that there seems to be more interest for cloud services offered by another NREN on the infra-

structural layers, with exception of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). NaaS may be less understood or still too new

a concept. NaaS is not yet on the generally accepted NIST Definition list of Cloud Computing.

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Storage-as-a-Service is also not on this NIST list and was well rated on the answers, but, contrary to NaaS,

storage is a simpler concept to grasp and there are already mature products available. This attractiveness is not

surprising since, on the application layers, the requirements tend to be more specific on each different local, and,

also, the solutions tend to be less standardised.

o4. Are you currently using services provided by a commercial provider?


67% (18 answers) responded they are not currently using services provided by a commercial provider.

19% (5 answers) responded that yes, they are using one or more services from commercial providers.

15% (4 respondents) gave no answer.

It's worth noting that the question was aimed at the NREN itself, not the community it serves.

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o5. Did you negotiate any specific agreement with the commercial provider,

beforehand?


There were two positive and two negative answers, three comments and no answers from three of the

respondents. Accordingly, the percentages of each answers category aren’t very relevant, and are not presented,

since the total answer count is small. One comment was about standard cloud contracts terms not fitting R&E

requirements, resulting in the need for specific agreements for the research and education community.

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o6. Would you be interested in using cloud services offered by a commercial

provider?


This question shares similarities with the "o3" question above.

52% (14 answers) responded that yes, they would you be interested in using cloud services offered by a

commercial provider, of the service model "Infrastructure-as-a-Service".

48% (13 answers) responded positively to the service model "Storage-as-a-Service".

41% (11 answers) responded positively to the service model "Software-as-a-Service".

26% (7 answers) responded positively to the service model "Platform-as-a-Service".

15% (4 answers) responded positively to the service model "Network-as-a-Service".

There was one negative answer. Again, as found in the "o3" question above, there is the most interest for the

use cloud services on the infra-structural layers, being the probable reasons already indicated.

o7. If you already have, or you plan to deploy your own cloud services, would you be

interested in connecting it to services from other NRENS or cloud providers?

For this question, two scenarios were given:

connecting to "other NRENs";

connecting to "cloud provider".

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The first scenario had the most positive answers (want to connect): 15 versus 10 for the connecting to "cloud

provider" case. This probably relates to the trust relationship that is more challenging with public clouds.

The second scenario had the most negative answers (don’t want to connect): 6 versus 1 for the connecting to

"other NRENs" case, due to the same reason as noted above.

In both scenarios there were an expressive number of "uncertain" answers. It is likely that this relates to the

absence of a concrete architecture on which a specific evaluation could be made.

The following graph is related to connecting to "other NRENs" scenario.

Figure 23: Question o7 Results

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The following chart illustrates connecting to the "cloud provider" scenario.

Figure 24: Question o7 results: Cloud provider scenario

o8. Would you find the following cloud integration scenarios interesting/relevant for

your NREN?


The answers where 50% for each scenario, and no answers selected for other scenarios. The interpretation is

that the two scenarios are equally attractive.

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Standards and Implementation

s1: If you are developing or have developed software components, would you be

willing to share the relevant code with other NRENs? If your source code is available,

please provide links to it and the license it uses in the "comments" field.

Figure 26: Question s1 Results

For this question 52% of NRENs expressed that they would be willing to share any code developments they have

made with other NRENs. The SW that NRENs have developed is based on OpenStack, Shibboleth-

Authentication and SURFconext middleware.

S2: What are the main “building blocks” of your cloud offering (cloud orchestrator,

AAI middleware, etc.)? What standards (possibly, de facto) are they based on? Please

feel free to provide links to documentation.

A total of 17 answers were received for this question, including:

OpenStack

OpenNebula

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Ceph Puppet

Shibboleth

simpleSAMLphp

ownCloud

GlusterFS.

This response points to a lot of SW development being centred around AAI issues.

S3: What amount of computing resources are you devoting to cloud offering (number

of cores, disk space, amount of RAM)?

A total of 11 answers were received, and there is a wide spectrum of responses. There are cases with 560GB to

200TB storage, 6 cores to 300 cores and up to 1.6TB RAM. Most of the responses are centred around 160-

200TB disk, while core numbers are spread throughout the spectrum 6-300.

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Collaboration in GÉANT and with other NRENs

c1: In GÉANT, the NRENs collaborate on cloud services. What are the most important

topics for you, to work on together?

This question was set for open-text responses, of which 14 responses were received, including:

Federation of NaaS

Common knowledge database

procurement

standards and brokering common framework for licensed SW (e.g ownCloud)

Business models, harmonised T&Cs

integration of AAI based on GÉANT services

c2: If you are currently offering, or planning to offer, cloud services, what are the most

appealing activities that GÉANT and other NRENs can do to support your efforts?

This question had 11 elements to it and it asked to rate the importance of each element. The summary here

highlights the proportion of responses that received a 4 or 5 score (5 being the highest importance) in terms of

importance for the NREN:

1. Share knowledge about cloud opportunities: 86.96%

2. Share knowledge about cloud services brokering: 86.96%

3. Share experience about cloud procurement: 91.3%

4. Share knowledge about cloud implementation and adoption: 91.3%

5. Share knowledge about cloud operation: 90.91%

6. Share knowledge about cloud promotion: 40.91%

7. Share knowledge about cloud security: 87.5%

8. Share knowledge about cloud application development: 54.55%

9. Share knowledge about cloud sustainability: 72.73%

10. Offer cloud services to NREN staff: 47.62%

11. Offer cloud services to NREN customers: 71.43%

These responses are in line with expectations. The interesting answers are the relatively low percentage of high

importance attributed to sharing information on cloud promotion and application development (6,8). The relatively

low score for 10 is interesting in that one would expect this score to be even lower in favour of a higher score for

N.11.

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In any case, it is clear that sharing knowledge in the broad area of brokering, procurement, operations, security

etc. is seen as a very important aspect for NRENs and GÉANT collaboration.

c3: What can you recognise as distinctive features and differentiating elements that

GÉANT and NRENs can use and offer to higher education and research with regards

to cloud services in addition to existing free or commercial offers?

This question had five elements to it, listed below with a summary of the percentage of responses that received

a score of 4 or 5:

1. Ability to fit specific needs of NREN users: 77.27%

2. Integration with AAI: 86.96%

3. Integration with other NREN services: 69.57%

4. Trust and data protection: 95.65%

5. Training and support : 63.64%

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