Community

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.

The Flemish government and the Walloon Region recently renewed their collaboration with Belnet. This will allow all recognised Flemish and Walloon universities, colleges and research centres to enjoy high-performance access to the Belnet network at a greatly reduced rate for the next 15 years.

In late 2021, the European Commission launched a call to establish a national quantum communications infrastructure for each Member State. In Belgium, a consortium consisting of several partners, including Belnet, will take charge of rolling out a quantum network.

The European research and education network GÉANT is launching an Innovation Programme to support innovative projects within the European R&E community. The funding - up to EUR 30 000 per project - offers a unique opportunity to enable initial development, establish or test new ideas.

The exchange of ideas and expertise with our community is crucial for an organisation like Belnet. Through its active involvement in the GN5 project, Belnet seeks to contribute to the further development of the e-infrastructure for European research and educational institutions.

Belnet is currently working on implementing a Service Improvement Programme to improve the resilience of our network to cyber-attacks. Our Technical Director Dirk Haex explains why it is crucial that the entire Belnet community is engaged with this task.

When we talk about web applications for sending very large files, it is not uncommon to think directly of WeTransfer. However, we recommend the utmost vigilance when using this type of tool. Our FileSender service provides a secure alternative.

Following this year’s success, the European research and education network GÉANT is launching again an Innovation Programme to support innovative projects within the European R&E community. The funding - up to EUR 30 000 per project - offers a unique opportunity to enable initial development, establish or test new ideas.