By Francois Giudice, Correspondent France

The French Space Agency (CNES) has chosen Orange Business Services to lead an industry consortium, including HPE, Scality and Tealenium, to design, deploy and maintain a new storage solution for its scientific and spatial data. This will help CNES fully modernize its storage infrastructure to better utilize the enormous amounts of data from its satellites.

The new data lake will be capable of hosting 100 petabytes of spatial data. The single storage space for data collection and archives will be simple, secure and fast for users to access. CNES is also looking to capitalize on it to develop new services incorporating visualization, data cross-referencing, and information sharing. 

A single point of contact for CNES, Orange Business Services will oversee the global governance of the entire project from design and installation to maintenance and ongoing operations. As a network-native digital services company and founding member of Gaia-X, Orange Business Services is well placed to leverage its expertise in data security and digital integration services, all while ensuring confidentiality of this data in compliance with regulatory requirements. Orange is also providing its expertise in the space sector, notably with the Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS) Sentinel-1 and 2 of the European Copernicus program.

“Spatial data is historically an issue for scientific research. They are becoming a strategic issue in the “new” data economy: satellites contribute at all levels to the creation of value, quite clearly in geolocation or in imagery, but now also to monitor climate change: sea level, ozone layer, CO2, etc. Increasingly voluminous, specific and complex, these data need to be captured, stored, processed and analyzed. As part of our data policy and with the support of Orange Business Services teams, we are developing a future-proof infrastructure to ensure access to this data, to facilitate science and also to support the emergence of new services, products, players, and a new industry,” stated Thierry Levoir, Director of Digital and Operations Departments, CNES.

“We are delighted to support CNES in this ambitious project to overhaul its storage infrastructure. We combine our know-how in integrating complex solutions with the complementary expertise of our partners in order to contribute to the digital transformation of CNES. We are thus participating in the strategy for enhancing the value of spatial data and promoting the influence of French space policy,” said  France Director of Cloud activities at Orange Business Services, Etienne Bonhomme.