In that capacity, DESY is member of the German Helmholtz Research Association, a group of 19 independent research centers all over Germany, providing a world-class science infrastructure, focusing on the major societal challenges of our time, covering areas like climate change, energy transition, transport in the future and the battle against severe and widespread diseases. In order to most efficiently use its distributed IT resources and expertise and at the same time reduce the energy footprint, the Association is operating the Helmholtz Federated Services, in short HIFIS. The platform provides a seamless and powerful ICT infrastructure to the entire Helmholtz scientific community. Within HIFIS, DESY is responsible for the implementation of the central Cloud Portal, making firstclass distributed cloud services available and easily accessible to the 42 000 employees of all Helmholtz centres and, whenever possible, to external scientific collaboration partners.