The OCRE framework of Cloud services (IaaS; PaaS; SaaS) was tendered in Europe last year, resulting in the awarding of 473 supplier contracts. All supplier platforms have direct peering into the NRENs (regional or national), eduGAIN registrations (R&E T&I federations), and their services have been tested by CERN using standardised research workloads. The framework has provided for the ease of consumption of such services for the research and education community in Europe. Unprecedented framework specific discounts have been negotiated. Recorded trends indicated that this community doubles it’s use of these services year on year. At the current rate of innovation, researchers, academics, and students are moving towards simply consuming bespoke commercial platform and software solutions that are focused on the activities of this industry sector. Institutes are staring to use software defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) to prioritise the distribution of bandwidth to strategic applications. Through EOSC (the European Open Science Cloud), mechanisms that will allow the distribution of such services to the researchers are being developed. Proof of concepts include the OCRE open calls for research institutes to be able to submit compelling project proposals for funding. These will provide for flagship case studies showcasing the impact of cloud services on research agility and outcome. The European funded EOSC Future project will support similar activities but will also focus on the researcher consumption of commercial data constituting an element of the research data space. A digital innovation hub (DIH) has been set up which will publish co-creation opportunities for start-ups and SMEs wanting to develop bespoke digital services for research and sustainable commercial models in support of such. What does all this mean to the institutes and their central IT organisations, and how do the NRENs prepare to provide the necessary support?