European Space Agency Picks Orange Business Services for Private Cloud

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen France-based Orange Business Services to deploy and manage its private cloud. The ESA private cloud is expected to deliver increased efficiency, flexibility and security to the agency’s network of 2,200 staff in eight locations.

The computing needs of the ESA are large-scale and diverse, including mission operations support, mission simulation and testing. The new solution, called esacloud, will provide a common, secure, rapidly provisioned infrastructure for the organization, according to Orange, which will improve productivity while providing lower cost computing resources.

“Esacloud will allow our scientists to do rocket science rather than IT, and our business to jump ahead in time more than five years,” said Filippo Angelucci, ESA head of IT Department and CIO. “We put a high value in close partnership with suppliers in IT and since being selected in 2000, Orange Business Services has helped ESA innovate and be a pioneer in many areas, such as the first European converged MPLS IP VPN. Esacloud marks a new milestone in our joint path.”

Esacloud will be delivered from two mirrored data centers to ensure redundancy for applications and services. Role-based access control and customized security design will provide the necessary high level of security, Orange says.

Orange created Orange Cyberdefense in January after acquiring security management company Atheos.

The selection of Orange as private cloud provider, while perhaps not a foregone conclusion, is not surprising, given the industry and geopolitical circumstances. While American companies like AWS and Microsoft supply cloud services for NASA, and while new private cloud offerings have become available from companies like US-based CenturyLink and China-based Huawei this year, none of those were likely choices.

Due to the scale of the ESA’s needs and prevailing mistrust of US-based clouds, as shown by a May survey of European IT managers, it is probable that only large European providers were in the running for the high-profile cloud services contract.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/european-space-agency-picks-orange-business-services-private-cloud