On October 15th 2021, the PUNCH4NFDI consortium held a workshop to formally kick-off its initial 5-year work programme. PUNCH4NFDI (Particles, Universe, NuClei, and Hadrons for the Nationale ForschungsDaten-Infrastruktur) is one of several consortia within the German National Research Data Infrastructure, which had its inception just a year earlier. Over the coming years, PUNCH4NFDI will set up a federated storage and computing infrastructure, as well as a variety of associated services, to be used by researchers of several fields in physics that face similar data challenges. Astronomy and astroparticle physics are just two of those fields, and several GLOW members are among the diverse group of universities and research institutes that constitute this consortium. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration and welcome the great synergetic potential that this exciting initiative offers to our research community.