OCRE is funded by the European Union and acts as an intermediary between commercial cloud service providers and their consumers – scientific and educational institutions; it helps them to establish contracts (framework agreements) and obtain significant discounts.

This saves consumers money and time because OCRE takes on the complex process of procuring cloud services on behalf of scientific and educational institutions: it seeks providers, conducts a pan-European tender, and negotiates framework agreements specifically tailored to the requirements of each institution. Among the cloud service providers available through OCRE are Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).