Ankabut Users’ Meeting

Innovation-Implementation-Impact Oct 2, 2013

UAE Higher Education CIO Council

Agenda

1. Overview of the UAE HE CIO Council

2. Examples of Collaboration

3. How to Join the Council

4. Q&A with the Audience

Mission

The Higher Education CIO Council- UAE (CIO Council) is a member governed group whose purpose is to provide an open and collaborative forum for higher education IT leaders in the UAE to share ideas, knowledge, expertise and resources for the purpose of advancing the effective use of technology in higher education in the UAE.

Formed in December 2010.

Purpose

• Sharing challenges, ideas and best practices between member organizations

• Examining issues raised by other similar regional and global organizations (e.g. Educause) and discussing how they affect their own institutions in the local context.

• Achieving economies of scale through cooperating on bulk purchasing/ licensing agreements.

• Functioning as a collegial group for the mutual discussion of common issues and challenges

• Acting as a forum to showcase achievements and successes

Purpose

• Working as a group to achieve common goals or address common challenges (e.g. with vendors)

• Sharing of policies and procedures as well as best practices amongst members and promoting common standards

• Forming linkages with other organizational networks (eg Ankabut) to promote common agendas.

• Developing joint staffing arrangements where two or more member institutions may enter into an agreement to share specialist staff

Purpose

• Sharing expensive or scare resources or those resources that gain value through resource pooling (eg Grid and Supercomputing)

• Working together to form consortiums that could benefit from shared access to resources (eg similar to the Liwa consortium which has been developed by Higher Education Library Sector)

• Collaborating on joint funding, research or grant proposals

• Forming of working groups to look at specialist areas (eg grid computing, identity management)

Membership

• Membership is open to any Higher Education institution that has a physical campus presence in the UAE.

• Each institution may submit one person for membership.

• The member organization should be represented by its highest IT executive. Where the top executive in an organization responsible for IT has several other departments in their portfolio (eg Director Corporate Services) the person with the highest position who is responsible solely for IT would be able to represent the organization at the Council

• Members may be invited by other existing members to join the Council or may themselves submit an expression of interest to join

• If a member will be absent from a meeting, their institution may send a replacement. The member should notify the Chair of the name and position of the replacement prior to the meeting.

CIO Council Members

Meeting Format and Frequency

• Regular Meetings will be held every two months at a host site.

• It is preferred that meetings will be face to face

• Extra-ordinary meetings can be scheduled in addition to the normal meeting times if approved by the Executive Committee

• If working groups are formed these groups may meet on a schedule approved by their members and the group coordinator

• Next Meeting will be announced for the end of October where elections will be held for the new Executive

Governance

• The group will elect a Chair and two other members from the group to act as the Executive

• The Chair along with the 2 executive members are empowered to make operational decisions on minor matters that have a minor impact (and no financial) on the group as a means of moving the group forward and not causing continual disruption for other group members

• The executive positions will come up for election every 12 months in September

• There is no limit to the number of times the Chair or executive members can serve

• Members can nominate for the Chair position and/or executive positions

Examples of Collaboration

• Collaboration with Ankabut and the formation of the Ankabut Service Board

• BYOD impacts on our campuses

• High Performance Computing Clusters (HPC)

• IP Transparency in the UAE HE Institutions

• ERP Systems

• Internet Bandwidth Cost Comparison

• UAE Implementation of eduroam

• Use your home-university credentials everywhere • Internet access • Secure access (802.1X)

Wireless roaming over

eduroam®

eduroam

eduroam eduroam

eduroam eduroam

eduroam: EPFL, AUS and KUSTAR

eduroam: EPFL, AUS and KUSTAR

EPFL

ETLR1+2 (Netherland and Denmark)

User EPFL

AuthN AUS

Radius AUS

Network AUS

AuthN EPFL

Radius EPFL

Network EPFL

AUS IdP

AuthN server L

Radius server L

Network X

AuthN server M

Radius server M

Network Y

eduroam

Radius-based infrastructure

UAE FLR (EPFL ME): 91.198.19.151 FLR

EPFL

ETLRS : European Top-Level Radius Server FLR : Federation (national) top level Radius proxy Server

eduroam: EPFL, AUS and KUSTAR

• Initiative of EPFL Middle East:

• MoU with TERENA

• MoU with Ankabut

• EPFL Coordinated with TERENA to implement the FLR.ae

• Working group within the CIO Council: AUS, KUSTAR and EPFL Middle East

• Step-by-step documentation ready for interested universities

• Contact Dr Alaeddine El Fawal - alaeddine.elfawal@epfl.ae

How to Join

• Membership is open to any Higher Education institution that has a physical campus presence in the UAE.

• Each institution may submit one person for membership.

• The member organization should be represented by its highest IT executive.

• Contact: Leo de Sousa – ldesousa@aus.edu

Questions

Thank you

• Dr Yousif Asfour, Chief Information Officer, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Dr Alaeddine El Fawal, Director of IT Department and Strategic ICT Development, EPFL Middle East

• Leo de Sousa MSc, Director of Information Technology, American University of Sharjah