EOSC Future responds to INFRAEOSC-03-2020 call in order to integrate, consolidate, and connect e-infrastructures, research communities, and initiatives in Open Science to further develop the EOSC Portal, EOSC-Core and EOSC-Exchange of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EOSC Future is structured around six thematic pillars that strategically group the work package tasks and activities and coherently present the key objectives and activities of the project to stakeholders: Pillar 1 on Policy & Strategy will coordinate and support a strategic vision for the future EOSC; Pillar 2 on Connection & Integration will connect and integrate EOSC infrastructures, data, and services; Pillar 3 on Excellent Science & Interdisciplinarity will extend the EOSC value Chain with scientific use cases; Pillar 4 on Growth & Innovation will grow and innovate EOSC with value-added services; Pillar 5 on Skills & Training will train users and providers of the EOSC ecosystem; and Pillar 6 on Engagement & Communications will engage the wider EOSC Community at a global level. EOSC Future will unlock the potential of European research via a vision of Open Science for Society by (1) bringing all major stakeholders in the EOSC ecosystem together under one project umbrella to break the disciplinary and community silos and consolidate key EOSC project outputs, (2) developing scientific use cases in collaboration with the thematic communities showcasing the benefits and societal value of EOSC for doing excellent and interdisciplinary research, (3) engaging the wider EOSC community and increasing the visibility of EOSC through communications campaigns, marketing strategies, and physical and online engagement events, and (4) including the EOSC community in developing the EOSC Portal (including the long tail of science, public and private sectors, and international partners) via co-creation open calls.

Europe needs to step up its efforts and strengthen its very own security capacities to secure its digital society, economy, and democracy. It is time to reconquer Europe’s digital sovereignty. The vision for Europe can only be to join forces across Europe’s research, industry and public sector and to include all talents not just those that have representation in the EU mainstream or are within big organizations. Diversity and inclusion are keys for success. Europe has incredible coverage and talent in the area of IT and cybersecurity. The area of cybersecurity is geographically fragmented across Europe for competences, and often also technically fragmented with problem-specific development of security solutions. There is no doubt that excellent research exists in Europe. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this research does not result in IT products and solutions that contribute to the European Single Digital Market. On contrary, a lot of research, also financed by EU ERC grants, is tested on real data in large US companies that cooperate with them. Europe has to and is already rethinking this strategy. CONCORDIA addresses the current fragmentation of security competence by networking diverse competences into a leadership role via a synergistic agglomeration of a pan-European Cybersecurity Center. The vision of CONCORDIA is to build a community a strong cooperation between all stakeholders, understanding that all stakeholders have their KPIs, bridging among them, and fostering the development of IT products and solutions along the whole supply chain. Technologically, it projects a broad and evolvable data-driven and cognitive E2E Security approach for the ever-complex ever-interconnected compositions of emergent data-driven cloud, IoT and edge-assisted ICT ecosystems.

GN4-2 is the proposed project for the second Specific Grant Agreement under the 68-month Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) established between the GÉANT Consortium and the European Commission in April 2015.This second phase of implementing the FPA will raise European research to the next level by promoting scientific excellence, access and re-use of research data. It will also drive European-wide cost efficiencies in scientific infrastructure by promoting interoperability with other e-infrastructures on an unprecedented scale. The FPA objective for the GÉANT Partnership is to contribute to effective European research by making Europe the best-connected region in the world. GÉANT must offer European researchers the network, communications facilities and application access that ensure the digital continuum necessary to conduct world-class research in collaboration with their peers, regardless of geographical location. GÉANT will maintain the operational excellence of the established GÉANT services, while achieving economies on the costs of the backbone network. The reliable, secure and state-of-the-art network services offered to researchers and other network users across Europe will remain exceptional. Massive data-transfer capacities required by extreme-scale instruments and by the penetration of big data in many areas of science will be prototyped with due consideration to the specific security and deployment challenges. Trust and identity is also prioritised with the introduction of a scalable operational model and with user requirements addressed in close concertation with the AARC and proposed AARC2 projects. GN4-2 developments are also guided by the vision of a future where a set of coherent and integrated European e-infrastructure services will offer convenient, seamless access for end-users through a common service catalogue, and facilitating the adoption of services offered by new e-infrastructure developments, such as the European Open Science Cloud.

The Open Cloud for Research Environments consortium combines the expertise of four partners to enable access and drive the adoption and use of commercial digital services by the European research community. Essential for interdisciplinary research, these services include: • Commodity type commercial digital services, such as: • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), providing compute, storage, network and related services, and a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications as a public cloud service. • Software as a Service (SaaS), an on-demand software licensing and delivery model in which software is used by the customer on a subscription basis and is hosted by the supplier as a public cloud service. File storage (sync and share), online collaboration, simulation and virtualisation tools are example services. • Secure Earth Observation commercial services, which make use of the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS). After gathering user requirements, the OCRE will manage the adoption funds and buy resources from the selected suppliers (OCRE will act as customer) and make cloud resources available to institutions. Such a delivery vehicle is effective and efficient for the supply as well as the demand side. Service adoption is the key focus of this work. A legal and technical mechanism (The OCRE Business Management Platform) will be created to integrate a range of these commercial services into the EOSC hub in order to make them more easily available to researchers.