The Open Research Cloud Alliance (ORCA) is a global community organized effort to establish and promote research technology standards that foster interoperability between and among scientific research clouds. ORCA is organizing its 6th workshop, next 22th of May in Washington DC (US), bringing stakeholders together to address common challenges to achieve security, data-sharing collaborations across multiple organizational and administrative domains through the use of federation technologies.

The NIST Cloud Federation Reference Architecture (CFRA) is nearing completion and offers a solid framework to:

• Understand the entire federation design space
• Enable the identification of practical federation deployment and governance models that will address real-world needs.

Hence, at this point in time, it is critical for key cyberinfrastructure and research thought leaders — from both academic institutions and commercial cloud providers — to coordinate their efforts concerning:  

• Key scientific, industrial, and governmental use cases 
• Possible concrete implementation approaches using existing tooling and standards (e.g.: WS02 and OpenID Connect) 
• Desired federation governance models 
• Possible Proof-of-Concept implementations, testbeds and all other possible efforts
• Integration and reuse of existing federation-related tools and systems (e.g., InCommon and eduGAIN) 
• Agreement on best practices that can guide standardization efforts 
• Promotion of standards whereby interoperability and commercial maturation can be enhanced 
• Necessary compliance requirements for operational systems 
• Plans for on-going, long-term coordination efforts

To this purpose, the workshop will provide an orientation on the NIST CFRA, an overview of research, industrial, and governmental use-cases, presentations of alternative approaches to the deployment of federation platforms, and the ORCA Testbed initiative.

Book your spot here and take a look at the finalised agenda!