Connected to the future - ITnation

Grand entretien THOMAS SCHNEIDER
For years, one of our focus areas has been
security. We have a very strong expertise
in this field, and we never had any incident
due to malware or similar threats in our
IT environment.
We provide 24/7 support for the operational
environment. Our colleagues who are operating
satellites need to rely upon a robust
network and related systems. We want to
make sure that these are available 100%.
Do you focus solely on the EMEA
region or also worldwide ?
High availability is one of the key
elements of your business.
This is one of the main design and operating
principles that we also apply within IT.
If you do not follow certain principles during
the early stages of system design, it will be
difficult to include them later on. We need
to make sure that our business activities are
never adversely influenced by anything we
do on the IT side.
And also
for the customer.
How big is the IT department
of SES ASTRA ?
We employ 18 full-time staff and use external
resources when required. We are organised
in three teams, focusing on networks/security,
systems, and business applications. The
systems group supports a variety of aspects
ranging from PABX to servers and applications;
a third team has its focus on business
applications, such as messaging and collaboration
and content management systems.
How big is IT in the SES group ?
Our focus is on SES ASTRA and affiliated companies,
but we interact with our colleagues in all
other SES companies on a regular basis, too.
SES ASTRA guarantees high availability
to its customers, and IT is supporting the
business.
Each SES company has an IT function with a
broadly similar structure like ours, with varying
team sizes.
8 NOVEMbre 08