Cloud helps small team realise big ambitions at the European Space Agency

Filippo Angelucci, ESA CIO, explains how speeding up R&D and spreading knowledge via private cloud aids its missions

The European Space Agency (ESA) sees cloud computing as playing a significant role in both current and future missions, because it makes the planning of such ventures more flexible and cost efficient, especially in the R&D stage.

That's according to Filippo Angelucci, ESA head of IT department and CIO, who explained how the ability to turn large-scale computational resources on and off as required provides a great benefit to the agency, which last year successfully landed the space craft Philae on a comet 300 million miles from Earth.

"If you think of support activities in which you want to simulate certain environments, validate new tools and so on, those are activities which might require a lot of computing power and resources but then one day the project is finished and abandoned," he told Computing as part of an in-depth interview.

"With a traditional approach you'd have had to buy a lot of hardware and keep it as an investment, but you wouldn't take advantage of it most of the time," Angelucci continued, saying that cloud computing allows efficiencies by avoiding the need to provision and configure hardware.

"It allows engineers and scientists to operate more efficiently.They have the resources when they need it right away."

The European Space Agency has recently deployed an Orange Business Services private cloud to aid in the digital transformation of the organisation, and Angelucci explained how the arrangement has already brought benefits.

"Orange, for us, represented the possibility of acquiring capacity and knowledge that we wouldn't have been able to have on our own," he said.

"We're a limited team; we concentrate on putting together the capabilities where they exist, but can't be knowledgeable about all of the technological areas which we have to work on. Orange was able to mobilise knowledge across all of their sites around the world in those areas that we needed support," Angelucci added.

However, Orange isn't the only cloud provider utilised by ESA. The agency has also deployed a Red Hat Enterprise Linux cloud in some parts of the organisation. Angelucci detailed why this decision was made.

"We're technologically agnostic in the way that we don't have only one need in the variety of environments we need to support," he said.

"We will not go with only one technology or one implementation if we think that'll bring constraints to our operations. One cloud doesn't preclude other ones," Angelucci added.

Computing's full interview with Filippo Angelucci, head of IT department and CIO of the European Space Agency, will be published shortly.