Between February 2016 and May 2017, the Technical Services Cluster at EMBL-EBI (www.ebi.ac.uk) has been exploring the use of external cloud providers to complement the infrastructure that EMBL-EBI has on site. As a result of this exploration , EMBL-EBI is establishing a hybrid-cloud strategy around the delivery of IT infrastructure and is continuing to explore which aspects of its operations can be migrated into public clouds. This report provides an overview of the first phase of this activity.