News: Seminar on promoting RENAM services at the Research Institute for Mother and Child Health Care

Seminar on promoting RENAM services at the Research Institute for Mother and Child Health Care

On March 24, 2026, RENAM delivered a seminar for the promotion of services in support of the research and education community in Moldova; the event was hosted by the Research Institute for Mother and Child Health Care (IMC). As the national research and education network, RENAM develops modern electronic communications infrastructure and provides high-speed internet access and advanced digital services.

RENAM specialists Alexandru Cacean and Olga Popcova gave presentations on a variety of digital services, emphasizing the value of secure, federated access.

eduroam – the secure, world-wide Wi-Fi roaming access service developed for the international research and education community. It allows students, researchers and staff from participating institutions to obtain Internet connectivity across campus and when visiting other participating institutions by simply opening their laptop, mobile phone or other device.

eduroam users from Moldova can also freely access the internet abroad – with more than 10,000 eduroam hotspots across more than 100 countries – whether they are participating in the Erasmus+ international exchange programme, a scientific conference or a collaboration.

eduGAIN – a user authentication and authorisation service within the national identity federation LEAF (MoLdovan ResEarch and EducAtion Identity Federation), which simplifies access to national and European information resources for the research and education community. Today eduGAIN is used by over 80 national federations worldwide connecting more than 8,000 Identity and Service Providers.

eduVPN – a secure network connection service to access internal resources of the institution as well as services from different or remote locations.

FileSender – a service that enables to send large files quickly and securely. The sender has full control over who receives and can access the files and for which period of time – as it should be. With privacy, data security and digital sovereignty high on the agenda of both organizations and individuals, the FileSender open source web-application provides a secure, trustworthy and transparent way for sharing large files. Two examples of how the FileSender service is used in the medical domain were mentioned:

• at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, where employees of the care, education and research departments regularly send files to internal and external users;
• at the German Cancer Research Center, which selected FileSender due to its secure solution for large file transfers, offering robust encryption for the safe transmission of sensitive data.

EOSC EU Node services – a robust set of 6 services, that in its goal to accelerate the adoption of Open Science, address key challenges in modern research workflows, allowing users to operate efficiently within data-intensive environments:

• File Sync & Share (ownCloud) – enable automatic file syncing and secure sharing across locations and teams;
• Interactive Notebooks (JupyterHub) – create and share documents that include live code in programming languages (e.g., R and Python), mathematical equations, visualisations, and explanatory text;
• Large File Transfer (FileSender) – streamline large file transfers online with added security and integrity;
• Virtual Machines (OpenStack) – researchers are provided compute resources to launch their own Virtual Machines to create isolated environments for experimenting with different configurations, software setups, or algorithms;
• Cloud Container Platform (OKD – OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution) – deploy cloud-native containerised applications that can easily scale;
• Bulk Data Transfer (FTS – File Transfer Service) – simplifies the migration, automation, and monitoring of data transfer workflows while preserving existing client-side configurations for authentication, access, and firewalls at origin.

23 representatives of the IMC attended the seminar. The discussion that followed the presentations covered a variety of areas, such as the usefulness of the presented services, organizational issues and benefits of access through eduGAIN to various resources for IMC users, the connection of the interested persons to the eduroam service already implemented at IMC, eduroam coverage in Moldova and abroad, technical aspects of the eduVPN service, etc.