The EGI Operations Team coordinates the work of the distributed team of National Operations Centres and regional staff in addition to teams dedicated to security response and technical experts.

The goals are:

• Service delivery in a reliable and trusted way
• Gathering requirements from end users and understanding when a new functionality is needed
• Defining and maintaining Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) from service providers
• Making sure service monitoring is working to meet obligations defined in the OLAs
• Incorporating OLAs with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for end user communities
• Tracking usage with the Accounting service, which enables the future capacity planning and knowing who used what.

Security is a paramount concern in EGI. The Operations Team is involved in the ongoing evaluation and response of security threats and the monitoring of known security vulnerabilities across the federation, ensuring that patching is done sufficiently quickly.

The team supports the development and running of infrastructure services dealing with user Authentication and Authorization (AAI). In this way, access can be granted to resources in an easy way, across the federation and globally, with other peer infrastructures. This allows the exchange of best practices and paves the way for new collaborations.

In addition to these efforts, the Operations Team runs and serves a distributed helpdesk which lets users submit problem tickets or requests for new functionalities.

Software distribution is another important aspect of the EGI Operations work. The team maintains trusted channels for obtaining software and engages with early adopters to ensure that the software is ready for general usage.

Last but not least, EGI Operations ensures that the knowledge required to use, operate and maintain operations is accessible and retained in the form of adequate documentation.

Operations Plans for 2018

Over the course of 2018, the EGI Operations Team is engaging in a number of different activities to continue to improve the quality of service delivery. The central EGI Operations team is leading the Service Management development of the EOSC-hub project to ensure that best practices formed during the achievement of ISO 9001 and ISO/EIC 20000-1 certification in 2017 are followed during the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud. The team is also working to continue to improve the security, general quality and usability of the EGI Federated Cloud service.