The Covid crisis began more than a year ago, when offices were emptied almost overnight and companies and their employees had to move to a home office. The first big challenge was to create the physical conditions for telecommuting. Key providers of remote, secure, broadband communications have played a key role in this, including ZNET Telekom in 11 counties in the country. Gyula Zuber, owner of ZNET, spoke to Computerworld about the past year
Gyula Zuber: Last spring, when suddenly many people stayed home and started in their home office work, and distance learning started, there was a larger-than-expected increase in traffic in the networks. However, this gradually subsided and returned to a normal level. It is many years of experience that telecommunications will never stagnate, but the rate of growth may change. When we invest, we plan the network from the outset by anticipating the expected load change years in advance. All that has happened now is that we had to use the extra capacities built into the network earlier than planned. Thanks to this, we were able to satisfy the increased demands smoothly. At the same time, of course, we have also made improvements that would not have been necessary under normal circumstances.
Computerworld: Many people prefer urban housing to exchanged for cottages. How did you cope with the care of the resort areas
ZGy: Indeed, in the spring of 2020, people moved en masse to Lake Balaton, and everyone wanted to connect to the World Wide Web at the same time. Although many people also use the Internet in summer, mobilnet is typically satisfactory during holidays. However, working from home and studying is quite different. Suddenly we received such mass orders from Lake Balaton that we barely won. This situation has been repeated from time to time this year. At this level, corporate and retail needs are already blurring. The root cause on both sides is telecommuting. Companies turn to us to strengthen their office telecommunications connections, and the public to connect seamlessly to corporate systems.
CW : What was the bottleneck in ZNET?
ZGy: Human resources. For some reason, we can always hire few people with the right expertise around Lake Balaton. To meet the increased demand, we had to redirect mechanics from elsewhere. For example, from Győr, where the shutdown of Audi had a significant impact on the factory’s subcontractors, and thus the number of inquiries towards us was significantly reduced. We moved our people flexibly, so we solved the problem.
CW: What is perceived in the market affecting ZNET in the spring of 2021?
ZGy: People are used to the changed situation. They adapted in the same way to work, study, and have fun on the Internet as they did to wear a mask. The industry, on the other hand, has been hit hard over the past year. Telecommunication chips are not produced in Hungary, and even telecommunication equipment is not very large, our sources of supply are typically in Asia. We have traditionally been working with a relatively large inventory, but by now we have come to the point where we have practically run out of certain things. Our suppliers were still promising last year, the industry had some reserves. Today, however, it is completely empty, and they no longer believe it, they have no idea when they can deliver.
CW: While more than before workflow on the Internet, what has been experienced in the field of IT security? ZGy: There are two types of company management. One that takes IT security seriously, the other that only takes it seriously after your system has been hacked. We are in a difficult situation because we keep the gate open for customers to walk in and out of the internet. We have a relatively strict firewall to protect our customers. If the client does not request that the endpoint devices be accessed remotely, it will be disabled by default. However, we can no longer deal with software security issues on customers’ computers, it is everyone’s responsibility. What is up to us has been done long before the pandemic. Our unfortunate experience is that, on the one hand, cybercrime is spreading rapidly and, on the other, people are not prepared for it. Many people don’t even think that when they use some free application, they expose themselves to the manufacturer of that software. We usually pay for free use with our data. However, there may be errors in the data that could open a back entrance to the computer. There is nothing we can do about this type of IT security risk.
CW: What lessons can the epidemic period provide for both the service provider and the customer? for?
ZGy: A general lesson is that he who is flexible, adapts, can change, the survivor who clings to the ordinary dies. This is true for all sectors. A good example of this is our practice last March, when we suddenly got a lot of bandwidth requests. In response, we’ve tripled our download speeds and doubled our upload speeds for free by the summer. It didn’t require any extra investment, we had that much spare capacity. We have helped our customers a lot with this, who appreciated this step.
Hardware, software, tests, curiosities and colorful news from the IT world by clicking here!
