Integrated security solutions for a complex research infrastructure

The client

HUN-REN BRC (Biological Research Centre, Szeged) is one of the leading institutions of life science research, consisting of the Institutes of Biophysics, Biochemistry, Genetics and Plant Biology. It employs 260 researchers in total, and the research topics cover many areas of molecular and cell biology, ranging from the industrial use of bacteria through the directed breeding of crops to questions of human health and environmental protection.

The IT leader

Gábor Németh joined the BRC in 2004 as a systems administrator and was appointed Head of IT in 2017. Before the BRC he worked at SZÜV and Albacomp, and he is also active as a sole trader.

The BRC’s systems administration group has four members, serving 650 users and 3,300 endpoints. The number of devices served changes flexibly, as the researchers working here can also add their own devices to the network. Gábor Németh and his team are primarily responsible for operating the central infrastructure, and they also manage the researchers’ requests, machines and IT equipment. In addition, they provide IT support for research tasks.

A professional partner instead of an in-house team

Gábor Németh’s predecessor approached Andrews with the aim of building and strengthening their firewalls. Having reached the limits of both their professional and human resources, they needed a professional provider to take this burden off their shoulders. They judged that building an in-house team for this role would be too costly and risky, so they opted instead for an external partner that is available 24/7 and also provides on-call duty, all of it cost-effectively.

Andrews won this project in 2017 because its operation was transparent for the BRC and because it has outstanding competences. It was also convincing in the selection that they would not have to deal with a reseller, but could talk directly to the engineers whenever they needed something.

Integrated solutions, smooth operation

For the BRC, Andrews handles both the implementation and the operation of the firewalls, and the institute also uses their MSA mail filtering solution. In addition, they often entrust Andrews with the maintenance of their monitoring system or other smaller developments. Since the MSA filter solution integrates with their firewall, Andrews knows the BRC’s system excellently and largely uses the same technologies as HUN-REN BRC, so it was natural to entrust them with this task too.

There is continuous professional contact between the teams of the BRC and Andrews, so the Andrews team knows the BRC’s system inside out and can propose genuinely useful, tailored solutions whenever difficulties or blockers are reported.

Predictability, IT risk management and professional thoroughness

Gábor Németh highlighted as an advantage of Andrews that they always ask questions, and they do so very efficiently. Professionally they go through the tasks ahead of them down to the last detail, so they can propose a solution that is really meant for them, not to mention that Andrews’ pricing is also spot on. Other companies, by contrast, quoted blindly, often mentioning only an engineering hourly rate. The BRC, however, is a budgetary institution, so every forint spent has to be justified, which makes it especially important for them that costs are predictable from the outset.

Andrews continuously monitors their system, so it is Andrews who alerts them if they notice any problem. They send warnings and flag faults, either on their own platform or by phone if the issue is serious enough. Andrews also proposes a solution for these, so they are quickly mitigated with joint effort.

Although the BRC has a 5/8 supervision contract with Andrews, their specialists are available 24/7, and if they are contacted outside the contracted hours, they fix the problem for a pre-agreed hourly fee. “But this has not really been typical, it happened maybe once or twice, because Andrews works in a way that everything works.” According to Gábor, as the research infrastructure changes, new requests, rules and problems do come up on the HUN-REN BRC side that have to be solved, but in operations and day-to-day running there have been no notable incidents.

Because of the research data and the constantly changing software environment, IT risk management here is not a one-off task but a matter of continuous monitoring.