Interview

Would you like to know more about Belnet activities in 2021 ? Our annual report is now available

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.

Steve Colin (Coordinator of the eServices Unit of the Digital Campus of the Haute-Ecole Condorcet) recently produced a manual to help you implement Office 365 authentication by configuring Shibboleth IdP v4.x on Debian-Ubuntu Linux (with Apache2 + Jetty9). This specific configuration is available in a particularly detailed manual in our FAQ pages. 

Among the various tasks of the ITSM, change management is essential to ensure the stability of your infrastructure when changes are implemented. Rolling out these processes does not happen overnight, which is why Belnet, through its ITSM team, offers presentations to raise awareness among its community. To find out more, we spoke to the ITSM team coordinator, Jean-Christophe Real.

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.

In a context of increasing digitalisation, the teams of Philippe Hennebert (IT Director - Institut Jules Bordet) and David Lerens (IT Support Manager for the Clinical Trials Support Unit) play a key role within the Institut Jules Bordet. On the eve of a landmark move, they talk about the role of IT in research, the various challenges linked to the crisis and their long-standing collaboration with Belnet.

The Hospital Network Antwerp (ZNA) is the biggest health organisation in Belgium. In addition to providing care at ten different sites, the ZNA also carries out research. Belnet spoke with Alix Devroye, Network and Security System Administrator, about the challenges which the COVID-19 crisis has brought in terms of ICT and about the increasing importance of security.