The benefits of a NREN-provided Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform are obvious. This kind of service perfectly fits into the role of a NREN provider in many ways, which enables member organizations to focus on innovative tasks and problems instead of bothering about the required infrastructure. Most of the time setting up the environment for a new service or the IT background of a research project starts with looking for suitable hardware, which, sometimes, is hard to find. If the service has QoS requirements, the task gets even more complicated and resource consuming. Enabling efficient collaboration is another example that usually requires dedicated hardware from at least one participant since shared hardware may contain sensitive information.

With an IaaS cloud, all these problems get solved in a single step. Member organizations can apply for virtual machines (VMs) running over a distributed pool of physical hardware. The cloud itself offers a reliable, robust and efficient infrastructure for the VMs to run on.

Once a virtual machine is created, the owner has full control over it, and can install almost any kind of operating system and application stack on it, which gives the possibility to run an unlimited variety of services. This way the cloud can be viewed as an advanced service for advanced users that removes the heavy administration burden from the shoulders of institutions. By requesting a virtual machine, users are guaranteed that their services are in the right hands: the cloud produces automatic failover in case of hardware failure, and efficient use of physical hardware by employing virtualization.

Besides enabling users to create virtual machines on demand, one of the key goals of building a cloud was that it is also suitable for scientific purposes implying a number of technical features being not present in commercial clouds. Many applications commonly used in the scientific world (mostly grids and computing clusters) require these features to function properly.