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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership. Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.

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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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August 20, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Motywowanie pracowników - programy, metody i dobre praktyki

To oczywiste, że o sukcesie organizacji decydują ludzie. Ci powinni być zmotywowani i uśmiechnięci. Wysoki poziom identyfikacji i zaangażowania buduje się długo i mozolne, ale najlepsi managerowie mają sprawdzone techniki, praktyki i metody cierpliwego podnoszenia motywacji zespołów.

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August 20, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical polish

SECURITY TRIBE: SESJA STRATEGICZNA

Podczas wystąpień, case studies i stolików dyskusyjnych omówimy następujące zagadnienia:    Wdrożenie Zero Trust Cybersecurity risk assesment / Risk management / Zarządzanie ryzykiem w organizacji kluczowej Zarządzanie tożsamością / PIM/IAM / IAM Bezpieczenstwo w łancuchu życia aplikacji i systemów (Bezpieczestwo SDLC)

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August 26, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI w chmurze czy on-prem? Praktyczne porównanie środowisk w budowie i rozwoju projektów

Marek Laskowski z Domański Zakrzewski Palinka, opierając się na doświadczeniach z wdrażania rozwiązań AI zarówno w chmurze, jak i w środowiskach on-premises, przedstawi praktyczne porównanie obu podejść. Omówi kluczowe aspekty: od kosztów i time-to-market, przez wymagane kompetencje i model organizacji zespołów IT, po utrzymanie i skalowanie rozwiązań. Marek przyjrzy się zaletom i wadom obu modeli i wskaże, jakie kryteria powinny decydować o wyborze środowiska dla konkretnego projektu AI.

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CIONET Partner Updates

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The Institut Pasteur and AWS are analysing the world's DNA, using a public database

Institut Pasteur, a leading French virology research center, processed 20 petabytes of DNA data in record 30 hours, leveraging AWS Batch over a cluster of 2.18M AWS Graviton cores.

30 hours

Reduce the computing time required of 30 million vCPU hours to 30 hours, with 2.18 million vCPUs mobilised at peak

20-petabyte

First exhaustive use of a 20-petabyte DNA database

AWS expertise

Provision of AWS technical resources and support expertise

 

Overview

To date, less than 0.01% of existing viruses have been identified. And among these countless as yet unknown species may lie the culprit of a future pandemic. Following the Covid-19 crisis, and to more easily identify future threats, a research project called "IndexThePlanet" at the Institut Pasteur set about analysing and mapping the DNA of the entire living world, using a public database. However, to process such a large volume of data, the project had to set up an appropriate infrastructure to meet the challenge of processing some 20 petabytes of data. This is the purpose of the partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has provided the researchers with a cluster of more than 2 million vCPUs to carry out this massive task. 

 

Hardware electronic circuit board. technology style concept semiconductor motherboard computer server cpu
 

Opportunity

To date, only 0.01% of existing viruses have been identified, and their exact number is still unknown. Among these countless as yet unknown species may lie the culprit behind a future pandemic. Following the Covid-19 crisis, a research team at the Institut Pasteur set about analysing and mapping the DNA of all living organisms to help identify future threats.

To process such a large volume of data, the team set up an appropriate infrastructure to meet the challenge of processing 20 petabytes of DNA data. To put this in perspective, this is roughly equivalent to all the data YouTube hosted during its first decade. This is the purpose of the partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has provided the researchers with a cluster of 2.18 million vCPUs to carry out this massive task.

"The IndexThePlanet project is actually the sequel to an initial research project carried out jointly with an international team, the Serratus project, which led to the identification of new species of coronavirus and other RNA viruses," points out Rayan Chikhi, a bio-computing researcher at the Institut Pasteur. It has enabled us to map ten times as many species as before, with a total of around 3 petabytes of data analysed. "Encouraged by this initial success, we decided to take things a step further by broadening the spectrum to include all viruses present on earth, i.e., by analysing the DNA of all known living organisms. This naturally represents a considerable challenge in terms of computing power, since this time we had to process a volume of data more than six times greater than that of the Serratus project."

 

 

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AWS has mobilised considerable resources, which have reached 2.18 million vCPUs at peak for Graviton instances."

"We reckon it would have taken a desktop computer nearly 30 million hours, or 3,400 years, to carry out such a calculation."

 

 

Solution

Developing a DNA Search Engine

For this research, the teams at the Institut Pasteur had access to a global database, stored and accessible to the scientific community by AWS and its Registry of Open Data Programme. This database contains sequencing data for all living species on Earth. However interesting this data may be scientifically, it is still unstructured, making it extremely tedious to explore. The IndexThePlanet project is therefore based on two specific stages: first of all, the "global analysis" of this database in order to make it readable and usable, and secondly, the provision of a search engine that can quickly and efficiently navigate the index that has been created. This search engine should be operational by 2026.

"To really understand what is at stake in our work, we need to think of this database as a sort of gigantic library, but one in which all the pages of all the books have been scattered. The challenge for IndexThePlanet is to restore coherence to this data by methodically classifying all the DNA fragments in order to reconstruct them on the scale of a living being, but also taking account of its environment. This is a major undertaking, which should ultimately benefit the entire biological research community," adds the researcher.

 

2.18 Million vCPUs Mobilised

The Institut Pasteur consequently turned to AWS to set up an appropriate infrastructure to meet the challenge of this massive processing. "Preparing the operations took almost a year, ultimately resulting in a calculation batch lasting just 30 hours," smiles Rayan Chikhi. But what a batch! During processing, AWS mobilised considerable resources, which reached 2.18 million vCPUs at peak for the AWS Graviton instances. As a comparison, we reckon that it would have taken a desktop computer nearly 30 million hours, or 3,400 years, to carry out such a calculation.”

AWS Technical Support

"To provide the best support for the Institut Pasteur's teams, we called on all the resources available to us," explains Dorian Schaal from Amazon Web Services, who supported the researcher throughout the project. This included scheduling the calculations over the weekend to access resources that were less in demand, as the massive size of the resources took up a significant proportion of the available resources. He continued: "The success of this project is something our teams are very proud of, and will help enhance the Open Data database that AWS is making available free of charge to the global scientific community."

 

Facilitating Tomorrow's Processing

The IndexThePlanet project has resulted in the creation of two datasets: a complete one of 2.2 petabytes and a more compact one of around 400 terabytes, which will serve as the basis for the future genomic search engine. It will provide accurate information on all the viruses and bacteria in the global database. A success that Rayan Chikhi nevertheless tempers: "this database is still highly incomplete in terms of terrestrial variety and, despite its success, this research project will only make it possible to increase the number of known viruses from 0.01 to 0.1%. But the progress remains considerable in terms of current knowledge". Ultimately, IndexThePlanet could serve as the basis for a system dedicated to global monitoring of the emergence of pandemics. From the moment a strain is discovered in a hospital, it could be compared with all the genetic material on the planet, saving precious time in the search for treatments and vaccines and potentially saving tens of thousands of lives.

 

Architecture Diagram

 
 

About Institut Pasteur

Founded by Louis Pasteur in 1887, the Institut Pasteur is a world-renowned French biomedical research centre conducting cutting-edge scientific research on infectious diseases and public health.

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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Healthcare Circle

Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?

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Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.

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Les Rencontres

Découvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !

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Female Leadership Circle

CIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.

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