Context
Currently, EDITO's cloud resources are provided by CloudFerro in Warsaw region WAW3-1. The EDITO platform is built on a strategic cloud infrastructure designed to meet rigorous requirements. This architecture ensures not only optimal performance for processing climate and environmental data, but also a level of data security to meet the European standards.
Why CloudFerro?
As a major contributor to the Destination Earth initiative, CloudFerro provides the technical backbone necessary for deploying digital twins. The WAW3-1 region, located in the European Union, ensures that all sensitive data processed by EDITO remains subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and European laws on digital sovereignty.
Security at Cloud Ferro is based on a "Trusted Cloud" approach: the infrastructure is designed to isolate critical workloads, such as those of EDITO, within secure and resilient environments. The platform employs data encryption protocols, both at rest and in transit, ensuring that information flows between researchers, models and data repositories remain inaccessible to unauthorized third parties.
Futhermore, by relying on a European provider specializing in the public sector and research, the platform avoids dependence on non-European tech giants, thereby reducing the risks of vendor lock-in and indirect access to data by foreign governments. CloudFerro thus acts as a neutral gatekeeper, providing the necessary high-performance computing (HPC) resources and storage without compromising the strategic independence of the European initiative.
In conclusion, hosting EDITO’s cloud resources with CloudFerro in the WAW3-1 region provides a multi-layered security guarantee. It combines European regulatory compliance, data sovereignty, technical resilience, and strategic independence. This setup allows the EDITO platform to focus on its core mission: providing accurate and reliable climate simulations to inform policy and societal decisions, knowing that the integrity and confidentiality of its data are protected by one of the most secure cloud infrastructures in Europe.
Working with CloudFerro
CloudFerro is a prime contractor for EUMETSAT, Europe's meteorological satellite agency and is reponsible for coordinating the Data Lake project for DestinE and delivering cloud infrastructure, as well as big data processing services, including distributed computing and workflows.
CloudFerro is also collaborating with two European partners - CS Group responsible for the area of discovery and data access, and EODC, who are in charge of big data processing. Harmonised data access (HDA) will be used to simplify data discovery and access to two Digital Twins managed by ECMWF (Extreme Weather and Climate Change Adaptation), external federated data spaces allowing to leverage many public data sources supported by the EU, and user generated data.
What's next?
On EDITO's side, we use an authentication system based on the OAuth protocol, an "authorization delegation" protocol, that verifies who is authorized to request data.
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