Corona and the ICT infrastructure: Learnings and challenges

The restrictions introduced in March 2020 to fight the Corona pandemic have led to a massive increase of the use of voice, videoconferencing and messenger services as well as streaming and gaming. The traffic distribution along days and weeks has shifted considerably. In Germany, the sudden increase of working from home and the related access to the office IT infrastructure from home has been mastered generally well by the companies and their staff. Essential factors of success were their willingness to learn and to apply pragmatic solutions. The underlaying ICT infrastructures did cope surprisingly well with the sudden increase of traffic and amount of data. The widespread use of cloud technologies with their inherent elasticity allowed to react rapidly to the changes of the load patterns. On the networks side, the usual pre-emptive build-out to cope with the ever-growing data traffic was the base to handle successfully the sudden increase of network load. Communication networks in both Europe and North America have seen a typical average traffic increase of 20-30% from March to September 2020, mainly driven by video conferencing, streaming and gaming. The carrier networks, content delivery networks and service provider cloud infrastructures could handle well the fast increase of traffic thanks to the provisions for its usual growth. Residential access networks have developed into a kind of critical infrastructure. In parallel to the increased usage of various services from home, a strong increase of the number of cyberattacks on networks was observed. An effective protection against these attacks has become more important than ever before. © VDE VERLAG GMBH · Berlin · Offenbach