Support for Digitization

Online lectures and seminars via video conferencing for more than 400,000 students in Bavaria: The universities and colleges in Munich and Bavaria are fully occupied with digitizing research, teaching and administrative processes. The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is providing the necessary technical resources for this, including the Munich Scientific Network (Müncher Wissenschaftsnetz, short MWN): "We are ready for the winter semester and are providing universities and research institutes with secure transmission rates and practical services for research and teaching", explains Professor Dr. Helmut Reiser, Deputy Director of the LRZ and Head of the Communication Network Department. "With the MWN we have been reliably providing the central infrastructure for networked communication for years, now also for the administration of the Munich universities".

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and Technical University of Munich (TUM) have just commissioned Bavaria's largest scientific computing centre to operate their administration networks. "The operation of the MWN was and still is a core competence of the LRZ, so it is a logical step that we are now delegating the operation and responsibility for our administration networks there", said Markus Haggenmiller, IT Manager of the TUM's Administration Department. His colleague Dr. Oliver Diekamp, head of the IT department at the LMU, explains the reasoning behind the move as follows: "By supporting the LRZ, we can focus our internal resources better on our core tasks and the digitalization of further university processes.

Reliably secure services, efficient processes

The MWN stretches from the Zugspitze to the Wendelstein and via Munich to Triesdorf in northern Bavaria. It reliably connects universities and research institutes in the greater Munich area and offers students and scientists, among other things, mobile access via WLAN and access to the Internet as well as the possibility of seamlessly integrating the home office via secure Virtual Private Networks (VPN). At peak times, up to 40,000 people access the MWN simultaneously, and around 300,000 mobile devices log in there regularly. LMU and TUM now want to use this infrastructure for their administration. "The LRZ has the competent personnel, the know-how and the technology for the reliable operation of complex networks. We are pleased to be able to benefit from this expertise," says Diekamp from the LMU.

The IT service provider for science and research has systematically documented technical equipment and processes on which its services are based. For this purpose, the LRZ 2019 was certified according to the ISO standards 20000 and 27001 for service management and IT security. This also convinced LMU and TUM, because significantly higher security requirements are placed on administrative networks: "The demands for IT security are growing," says TUM expert Haggenmiller. "An important factor in bundling resources and competence at the LRZ now are the certifications of the data center, which guarantee stringent processes".

An Overview of MWN