EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute
Welcome to Embassy Cloud
Ever-larger scientific datasets may be a goldmine for discovery, but analysing them has become a bottleneck in life-science research. Organisations of all sizes face the challenge of providing infrastructure for managing Big Data, even when the demand for it is comparatively modest.

Embassy Cloud users (tenants) have direct access to the EMBL-EBI data, services and compute. This is a practical and cost-effective alternative to replicating services and downloading vast, public datasets locally. Tenants can access their workspace from anywhere in the world, reducing the need for capital investments in hardware and related operational costs.

Resilient and flexible

Just as an embassy is sovereign territory in a host country, an Embassy Cloud workspace is an isolated, secure environment hosted by EMBL-EBI, a public, international treaty organisation. This Infrastructure as a Service is hosted in our Tier 3+ secure data centre, and is logically outside the institute’s local area network (LAN). Traffic from an Embassy Cloud workspace to EMBL-EBI’s public data resources and services is retained within our own network infrastructure, but neither EMBL-EBI nor any other cloud client can access it.

About our users

Embassy Cloud includes EMBL-EBI collaborators and external organisations. Their driving interest is a quick and secure access to EMBL-EBI datasets. We offer distinct advantages over commercial cloud services, most notably direct network access to public data and services and file access to EMBL-EBI’s public and managed-access datasets.