Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendors have now been appointed

The list of dealers of Infrastructure-as-a-service for the education and research area in Denmark has just been put in place and published.

These are a wide range of solutions, consisting of both the global hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google, and a number of more specialized cloud solutions, which are called OIP (Original Infrastructure Providers). These cover resellers with self-developed platforms.

The agreements together include a wide range from the individual platforms and noticeable discounts on these services. Discounts and terms may differ slightly between platforms, vendors and services. Vendors, platforms and range can be accessed and discontinued during the contract period.

It is recommended to keep up to date via the OCRE-project OCRE project and DeiC. For example, certain services can be settled at either fixed prices, according to consumption or consist of a combination of a fixed subscription and consumption assessment.

Mapping of existing consumption

Your institution may already have a number of Infrastructure-as-a-Service services in operation. If these were purchased under the previous framework contract, DeiC and the new vendor will be helpful in migrating your consumption to the new agreement. This also applies if your institution can identify consumption that was purchased outside the previous agreement.

In addition, there may be a consumption that can be difficult to identify. This may be the case, for example, when services have been purchased for project or research purposes and are deeply buried in a comprehensive chart of accounts, or have even been ordered over a credit card and booked inaccurately.

DeiC, together with the new vendors, will be helpful in identifying such consumption and migrating it under the agreements. Then the discounts can be brought into play effectively.

Granting of contract

The new framework contracts in most cases involve an easier granting process. The starting point is that there is only one vendor per platform. Thus, if services from AWS (Amazon Web Services) are required, there will only be a single vendor of these (Rackspace) and the allocation can be made as a direct allocation at the vendor.

Regardless of the choice of granting form, your institution must justify and document a factual (and procurement law) valid reason for the granting. This also applies when a platform has been selected and it has been established that there are only one vendor and one product. Here, an allocation note can state, for example, that investments have already been made in the training of staff in the platform in question and that tools have already been developed which are used on the chosen platform.

DeiC and the vendor will help you get your order well in order. This also applies if your institution simply needs to transfer its commitment from the old cloud agreement to the new one, or needs to switch vendors. For example, Atea was a vendor of Microsoft Azure on the old cloud deal, while only SoftwareOne was on the new OCRE deal.

You can find more information about the OCRE contracts here and via DeiC's service description for OCRE.

If you have questions or want help making an assignment, please contact gn-clouds@deic.dk.