ESA has currently a mixture of fixed physical and virtual infrastructure. There are some activities which already make use of dynamic infrastructure (private cloud) for their own needs but this is a minority and still in the early phases. On the other hand, the Gaia mission is using public (Amazon) cloud services for data processing.
With this GSP study, ESA wanted to capture the business needs and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) requirements for 10 activities that had expressed interest in the Cloud and design one common IaaS blueprint for all of them, which would allow to simplify the Agency’s IT infrastructure and future IT procurements.