Testimonial

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the demand for virtual machines by URAN’s user organisations, the Ukrainian NREN, grew exponentially driven by the need to prevent data loss from the possible destruction of the physical infrastructure. Numerous universities were able to take advantage of the free cloud services offered by URAN, but the increased demand led to an unforeseen crisis caused by disk storage overload in the NREN’s data centre.

Since 1 June 2022, Belnet customers have been able to use the eduVPN service hosted by Belnet. In order to be certain that the open VPN solution meets the expectations of the R&E community, some customers – including Hasselt University – have been testing out eduVPN for several months in a proof of concept.

International collaboration is an inherent component of research and education networks such as Belnet. For instance, since 2012 we have been exchanging knowledge and experience with our colleagues at CEDESURK and their partner organisations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Together with Muliri MIRINDI Dieudonné and Patrick LUFUNDISU, we look back at the main challenges and achievements.

In 2019, the Haute École Robert Schuman (HERS) decided to upgrade its networking equipment, typically a huge investment. Fortunately, the circumstances were favourable: after all, Belnet had just started negotiating a framework agreement for networking equipment for its entire community. This agreement, which was recently awarded to the integrators Infradata and Dynniq after a European tendering procedure, gives all Belnet members access to the best possible conditions in terms of maintenance costs, purchase discounts – with reductions of up to 70 percent – and service quality.