Higher Education and the Adoption of Cloud Computing Technology in Africa

International Journal on Communications (IJC) Volume 4, 2015 Doi: 10.14355/ijc.2015.04.001

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Higher Education and the Adoption of Cloud Computing Technology in Africa Mboungou Mouyabi SEKE Business Intelligence Services, Wits CRM Office University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Private bag 3, 2050 South Africa Jordan.Seke@wits.ac.za Abstract With the emergent demand for information technology (IT) services, African Universities should consider adopting cloud computing to meet with this growing demand on different IT services, Cloud computing could provide good business models for African universities since these universities often do not have enough resources and knowledge to manage the necessary information technology (IT) support for educational, research and developmental activities that must be delivered in a higher education environment, while cloud computing aims to eliminate these complexities from the user.

This paper describes the importance and the challenges facing higher education in Africa, introduction to cloud computing technologies, services and deployment models, adoption of cloud computing in higher education as a possible solution despite the challenges facing higher education in Africa.

Keywords Adoption; Africa; Cloud Computing; Higher Education

Introduction Higher Educational Institutions hereinafter referred to as HEIs, in Africa and across the world are in the historic era. Information Technology (IT) aptitudes are alleged as significant cost centres, to many advocates, even though an institution relies on technology in every aspect of its operation, it is difficult to perfectly calculate the return-on-investment (ROI) from the cost of information technology. Correspondingly, it is challenging to attribute the benefits of technology in a straight line to the institution’s vision, mission and goals.

Cloud computing is now a topic of significant impact and, while it may represent an evolution in technology terms, the truth behind this approach is that, it has changed the ways in which both academia and industry are thinking and acting. If cloud computing is

one of today’s key technologies for the modernisation and realisation of the public sector as advocated by many, the belief is that cloud is part of the new trend of technology that is set to take computing experience to another level With huge finances needed in higher education globally and the growing demand for ITservices, universities in Africa are facing challenges in providing essentialInformation and Communication Technology (ICT) support for educational, research and developmental activities.

Although universities have been using “cloud-based” applications for years (e.g. email), the cloud computing fashion is quickly evolving into a premium model for data storage and exchange. According toGartner a technology research company, more than 50 per cent of Global 1000 companies are predicted to store confidential data in the public cloud by the end of 2016.

The cloud is proving itself as being (a) tech oriented that is here to stay.

This is mainly as a result of a new genre of students with learning needs vastly different from their predecessors. In addition, it is increasingly recognized that effective use of technology in higher education is essential to providing high quality education and preparing students for the challenges of the 21stcentury as underscored by Masud et al. (2012). It is also significant to note that, in many technology arenas, higher education exhibits two behaviours. With regards to networking and high-performance computing, higher education enjoys a reputation as an innovator. However, on the other handasargued byKatz et al, (2009), higher education is a relative late adopter in the applications and IT support arena.

Higher educational institutions argue that adopting the latest technologies and solutions is essential to staying competitive and holdingstudents. These 1

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students, known as “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001), the “Net Generation”, “Generation Y”, or even “Millennials”, have not known a world without the Internet (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). Through programs and social forums such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr, students already are well versed with and are frequent consumers of cloud-based technologies (Ercan, 2010).

However, in sharp contrast to this decrease in available funding for IT services and support, Cloud computing can actually help institutions reduce high expenditures on hardware, software and IT maintenance. Cloud computing provides businesses with a centralized, virtual data centre that is accessible, for example to faculty and admissions personnel at any time and any location.

In addition to what will be elaborated in this paper, regardless of this proliferation of cloud computing resources and interest enterprise globally, for some advocates and institutional administrators in Africa, the bench is still out.But there are other worthy concerns which warrant countlessscrutiny in the adoption of cloud computing in higher education.

Those concerns are the focus of this paper.

This paper provides an indication to cloud computing in higher education. The intent is to,first, explain those unfamiliar with the theory its definitions, the defining characteristics, and its service and deployment models.

These initial extents aproposofcloud computing are provided as contextual information and framework to then help border discussions. These discussions include its current implications and its adoption in higher education in Africa. Finally, the concluding section offers a result and discussion around the adoption role of cloud computing in higher education.

Defining Cloud Computing There are more ‘technical details’ to actual cloud infrastructure, platforms and delivery, but for the purpose here, I will stick to the basic view as with many new services, adoption of the next generation technology may be much greater than anyone expects, as users find novel way and context in which to apply it.

It is true that service providers and users globally have different definition of what “the Cloud” is. Cloud computing which is envisioned to change the IT landscape, is consumer/delivery model where IT capabilities are offered as services billed based on usage. Some advocates think otherwise.

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Cloud computing is about getting a service across the internet, either paid-for or free, where you don't need to be concerned with the mechanisms of provision of that service. In everyday life, that might include using Dropbox for file storage, or Apple iCloud for automatically syncing your photos and music to multiple devices, or Google Apps for document processing, or YouTube for storing and managing your videos, or Flickr for your photos. In fact, search engines like Google and Yahoo! are also cloud services, and examples of the genre that I suspect many are already using.

On a more elementary level, cloud computing is a system for automatically managing a collection of virtual computers somewhere that are very easy to create, manage, and destroy over the network, automatically, by software, without human action.

Cloud computing systems are also founded on the concept of resource sharing, which means that several virtual servers reside on one physical machine, and make variable use of its real hardware.

Cloud computing is a renewed concept that is still sprouting across the information technology industry and university circleseventhough in early 2009, McKinsey & Company reported that there were 22 distinct definitions of cloud computing in existence.

Numerous definitions have evolved so far, but for Mell and Grance (2009) of the National institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) whom the definition of cloud computing is credited or attributed, they define the concept as: “a model for enabling convenient, ondemand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”.

This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models (Mell & Grance, 2011).

On another elementary level, Cloud Computing is a copy of utility concept we are interacting in our daily life. In the same way that one uses utilities like electricity and water, someone can use cloud computing. When one needs water, the subject just open the kitchen tap, consume it, and pay according to the consumption with no concern on how the water is prepared and delivered to his house. Similarly, when one needs computing, he log-in into his cloud service provider system, consume services, and pay without

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any other technical concern (on how the consumed resources are provided for him).

Illustrating from early definition of the concept, one can store his files in Dropbox without having much concern on how the files are stored. When he needs more space, one does not need to make any effort, simply buy space from Dropbox and start using that instantaneously. Without Dropbox, one have to buy a new external hard disk with larger capacity, copy all his data from the old, small hard disk to the new one (to make everything in once place, otherwise data management becomes challenging) and keep using the space. One should repeat the same process again and again when the need of excess space is required.

Regardless of varying definitions of the term ‘cloud computing’, there appears to be consistency and general consensus in the literature on the general characteristics, service models and deployment models described by NIST. All these characteristics and models are beneficial to understand the context within higher education; they are described briefly in the next sections of the definition.

Five Essentials Characteristics of Cloud Computing The following five characteristics, as defined by NIST, are considered inherent in cloud computing services (Mell & Grance, 2011): 1.

On-Demand Self-Service: Customers can automatically provision computing capabilities and resources on their own when needed without necessitating any human intervention.

2.

Broad Network Access: Access and capabilities are available over the network through standard devices, such as cell phones, laptops, PDAs, etc.

3.

Resource Pooling: Resources such as network bandwidth, virtual machines, memory, processing power, storage capacity, etc. are pooled together to serve multiple customers using a multi-tenant model. That is; virtual and physical resources are dynamically assigned and reassigned based on need and customers’ demands.

4.

Rapid Elasticity: Depending on demand, resources and capabilities can be quickly and automatically deployed and scaled at any quantity and at any time.

5.

Measured Service: Customer usage of the vendor’s resources and services are

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automatically monitored; controlled and reported offering a high level of transparency for the customer and vendor.

Service Models In reference to Mell and Grance(2011), there are three typical kinds of cloud computing services: Processing Clouds that provide scalable and mostly affordable computing resources that run enterprise programs, which is also sometimes known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Storage Clouds that offer an alternative to local file systems also known as a Platform as a Service (PaaS); and Application Clouds also called Software as a Service (SaaS), which allow a thin client to interact with services that are completely hosted on an external infrastructure.By the same token, cloud may be hosted and employed in different fashions depending on the use case.

Deployment Models The cloud space is rapidly adopting a plethora of new short forms and expressions to designate different aspects of the offering, which is the next evolution of the Internet. For purposes of this paper, the following National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definitions are used for deployment models: • Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organisation. It may be managed by the organisation or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

• Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organisations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organisations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

• Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organisation selling cloud services.

• Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remains unique entities but are bound together by standardised or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).

It is essential to understand that the service models,

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deployment models and the five characteristics of cloud computing as described by NIST do not run independently but are necessarily interrelated and connected to each other. This visual demonstrates that a cloud-based strategy can take on different configurations depending on the institution’s needs. It is not uncommon for institutions to begin with one service model, such as SaaS and a Public Cloud deployment model as a pilot, and then slowly scale if the pilot proves successful. It is also possible to use several deployment models to support one or more service models.

FIGURE.1 INTERRELATIONSHIPS WITH CHARACTERISTICS, SERVICE MODELS AND DEPLOYMENT MODELS

Cloud Computing in Higher Education If one is in the IT channel, he is probably used to the fact that IT has its own language so it is in academia.

For an IT expert, the words ‘mouse’, ‘tablets’ and ‘cloud’ have different meaning than for most of the population surrounding him.

Irrespective of the nature of business one is or found himself into, there is a must know what is going on in the fast-paced ICT world; and the causticness surrounding cloud computing in higher education in Africa today is that most institutions, departments or faculties have already been using it to some extent but may not even realize it. Gmail or Yahoo as underlined early in this paper is one example.

In the most transformative technology shift since the personal computer commonly known or called PC and the internet, it is apparent that migrating business to the cloud has reached a tipping point in recent years, where it is no longer a development but rather an absolute business requirement and higher education institutions of the 21st century have no choice rather

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than to compromise.

As many contend that cloud computing holds a promise to provide considerable benefits to colleges and universities. By moving storage, processing, applications, or other IT infrastructure and services to the cloud, institutions might realize increased reliability and flexibility, with lower or more transparent costs (EDUCAUSE, 2010a) A rudimentary understanding of ICT in education is vital in beingwell-informed of rapidly changing technologies. It is essential for higher education actors to gain a solid understanding of how cloud computing is evolving, and the developments in its adoption.

Emphasis has been laid on IT in administrative and financial transactions, wireless and mobile communications with promising results, Funding projects in this direction has yielded proportionate outcomes too in developed and developing countries across the world.

The cloud based education system requires the use and creation of knowledge in higher education as a decisive factor for social, economic, cultural and technological transformation. Achieving this goal necessarily involves the use of technology, which would allow knowledge transmission and create new areas for education, research and development (Masud et al. 2012) However, the push by the ICT business, coupled with the noteworthy benefits that cloud computing promises to deliver, leads me to think that cloud computing will be widely used in higher education in the African continent. At the same time, I fully understand that the distinctive features of higher education data management necessitate a cautious assessment concerning whether, where, how, and when they might adopt cloud computing. But I am also aware of the fact that Information security depends on the three principles of confidentiality (who has access), integrity (correctness of information), and availability (ability to access information and services at appropriate times). These elements constitute computer security in any context, and they take on new significance in cloud computing because it depends on third-party providers (EDUCAUSE, 2010a).

It is remarkable to note that: the most important factor in promoting cloud computing has been the recognition that large data centres have thousands of servers that largely do not operate at full capacity, creating anexcess of computingability. By using these

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resources more efficiently through virtualization, cloud computing enables greater returns on data centre investments. In addition, it makes it possible for a university to create its own private cloudwithin its own infrastructure.

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models of Cloud Computing may be chosen to be used.

The decision must take into account the real needs and be aligned with the university strategy (Mircea and Andreescu, 2011).

1.

Increasing access to scarce IT expertise and talent.

2.

Scaling IT services and resources.

3.

Promoting further IT standardization.

Benefit realisation will also depend on the chosen cloud-computing deployment model.In the short to standard term, I am of the opinion that the selection of a cloud deployment model is one of the most important decisions higher education’s IT actors will face. African universities may choose to build their own private cloud for their own consumption, and even offer hosting services to other universities for the purpose of revenue generation.

4.

Accelerating time to market through IT supply bottleneck reductions.

Concerns over Adopting Cloud Computing

5.

Channelling or countering the ad consumerisation of enterprise IT services.

6.

Facilitating the transparent matching of IT costs, demand and funding.

7.

Increasing interoperability between disjoint technologies within and between institutions.

8.

Supporting a model of a 24 x 7 x 365/6 environment.

9.

Enabling the sourcing of cycles and storage powered by renewable energy.

Katz et al. (2009) identify 10 important features of cloud computing in higher education with respect to on-demand SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS:

hoc

10. Driving down capital and total costs of IT in higher education.

TABLE 1: MAIN BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS OF USING CLOUD COMPUTING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Benefits Access to applications from anywhere Support for teaching and learning Software free or pay per use 24 hours access to infrastructure andcontent Opening to business environment andadvanced research Protection of the environment by usinggreen technologies Increased openness of students to newtechnologies Increasing functional capabilities Offline usage with further synchronizationopportunities

Limitations Not all applications run in cloud Risks related to data protection and securityand accounts management Organizational support Dissemination politics, intellectual property Security and protection of sensitive data Maturity of solutions Lack of confidence Standards adherence Speed/lack of Internet can affect workmethods

Anyway, the use of Cloud Computing in higher education must be analysed both from the benefits point of view, as well as from that of the risks and limitations (table 1). After the analysis, one or more

Many encounters of cloud computing for higher education are about its relative newness and the underdevelopment of the marketplace for cloud services. For higher education in Africa, decisions to adopt cloud computing will be influenced by more than technical and cost considerations.Colleges and universities have deep concerns about the loss of control in cloud computing. Concerns about security are one of the major factors limiting greater adoption.

(EDUCAUSE, 2010a) The NIST (2009) underscores the research conducted by the IDC Enterprise Panel 2008 which concluded that the primary concerns at various levels voiced are: 1. Security: there are several concerns surrounding the implementation of security in cloud computing.

2. Performance and Availability experiments that are required for research endeavours require extensive computing power. Some of the concerns include how to guarantee such performance from an outside vendor. Availability of services is another related concern in terms of the possibility of massive vendor outages. This is true since it may influence student learning or the timely delivery of research results, which are typically tied to strict timelines.

3. Integration with in-house IT and Customizability: University IT administrators typically use their own in-house applications with a considerable portion that is customised to their own IT lab structure. A dominant anxiety is the transitioning of such in-house applications to the cloud environment and how much of the customizability will be lost in that process.

4. Cost considerations may be introduced by additional vendor relationship management or

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possibly additional measures that are unique to cloud computing.

Despite the growing acceptance of cloud computing and documented cost savings made possible by cloud computing in higher education, concerns about the vulnerability to security breaches are the biggest obstacles to cloud computing adoption in higher education. In addition to this, anxieties regarding privacy, data integrity, intellectual property management, regulation issues (e.g. In the US about HIPAA which is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and FERPA which stands for Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974), and audit trails are significant barriers to the adoption of cloud-based solutions (EDUCAUSE, 2010a).

Thus argue Masud et al (2012), the conceptual framework of integrating cloud computing in higher education is reflected in aspects concerning: policy, objectives and incentives; resources and facilities; computer resources; teaching and learning activities; processes of performance monitoring and evaluation.

Contract terms, liability provisions, indemnification, and exit strategies are vital. (EDUCAUSE, 2010a) Katz et al, (2009) underline the fact that those consulted believe that higher education is early in the “early adopters” stage of diffusion, and the analyst literature suggests that other sectors such as the commercial and government sectors are also in the early adopter stage of adopting cloud computing. For Katz et al, (2009), this shift is strategic. Cultural, organizational, and regulatory considerations, rather than technical ones, will slow adoption. Adoption will follow a standard technology maturity model as illustrated in figure 2.

FIGURE 2 EVERETT ROGERS’S MODEL FOR DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION

So, although cloud-based systems and applications

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have been with us for more than fifteen years- think of hosted email services like Hotmail, launched in 1996 and the whole question of cloud’s place in the higher education sphere is still concerned with working through its many complexities.

Cloud computing in my humble and firm opinion is primarily about taking the complexity of applications and client hardware that IT departments in the higher education institutions face every single day and resolving it into something that’s much simpler to control and manage.

Why will there be many concerns over the adoption?

The rise of the mobile students in higher education as the primary user of the university applications and services highlights a need for them to be accessible anywhere. But the back-end services supporting these mobile technologies continue to be wired using infrastructures unable to keep pace with this rising demand. Cloud computing’s property of load balancing explained further in this paper constitute an element of response to the concern.

Results and Discussion While challenges exist in term of cloud computing and it adoption; for the most part, higher education institutions worldwide reacted positively to the paradigm shift brought on by the requirements of an always-connected academic society. Thus, it is often valuable to compare new technologies to old when trying to understand where they fit.

In this case, before cloud computing, if one wanted a new server, or even a virtual instance of a server, he would have to communicate with a human, probably in a datacentre, at some point to have them bring it online. This could create some very real problems if the website can suddenly took off. In some cases, the other human would have to order and install new servers before he could get back online. Now, with cloud computing, one simply click some buttons on a web page and could bring up an arbitrary number of servers running predefined software and control and measure network access to them.

An additional property of cloud computing is that it is often makes use of load balancing. With load balancing, if one has software where a given server instance can handle 10,000 requests per second, but has instead 50,000 requests per second coming in, by putting a load balancer in front of five of these servers and it will balance requests to meet the requirements

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of the initial request load (in reality one would want some headroom, but this example keeps the math simple).

Though cloud computing is essentially well-thoughtout as the future of enterprise and consumer computing, it is not without disadvantages and imperfections that would prevent those with really special needs to adopt cloud computing into their business or organization. Personally, I believe that there is overpowering agreement regarding the potential of this concept in advancing technology and providing new avenues for enterprises to explore that may cut cost and adopt better IT capabilities.

Cloud computing promises on-demand and scalable access to computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort. For most organisations the choice is between public and private cloud, and most typically some synthesis of the two-hybrid cloud. The often result of moving to cloud solutions is a change in the cultural approach as there is more emphasis on collaboration and greater expectation that higher education institutions will benefit from.

And in the race to own the future of cloud computing, many companies are all on the hunt, although the acquisitions they are making do not always make sense when viewed in isolation. The true race to cloud in this region of the globe and the need to look at the infrastructure of the higher education institutions are closely woven together. As it is advocated by me today, the goal behind cloud adoption in higher education in Africa should be made in creating affordable access to basic internet services like e-library available to every student in the continent.

While some of the more high profile battles of cloud computing are being fought by the relative new dynamic of young students entering the higher education world today and big universities oversea, there is a lot of confusion and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on the topic in higher ranking varsities in Africa. I remain in the belief that cloud is integral to the future of higher education institutions in Africa; cloud must be one of the most talked about, supported and drawn-out service models ever, promising a new era of information technology.

The cloud, which is quickly and perpetually altering the ways that institutions deliver IT services, is shifting outlooks for what institutions require from IT leadership. In the recent past, Chief Information

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Officers or CIOs, the highest position of IT leadership in higher education have been tasked to support and maintain administrative and research computing and network services (EDUCAUSE, 2009b).On one hand, from a financial perspective in Africa particularly, purchasing, installing, and maintaining extensive hardware for high-powered servers contribute to some of the higher costs that universities are currently forced to allocate.

In the other end, a wide range of legislative, security, data protection and regional concerns complicate the pure no-borders ideal of cloud. However, because the benefits of cloud computing stretch far beyond this noborders genesis, widespread adoption in higher education institutions is inevitable. That simply means the way ICT departments in higher education institutions provide and implement their labs, training venues and services will inevitably have to change as well.

It is very important to note that higher education is subject to regulations concerning the protection of student records and other data, and individual campuses tend to be idiosyncratic with respect to state or local requirements and cultural attitudes towards risk. In light of the findings on security, any institution that turns to cloud computing faces important questions about how information assets will be safeguarded and what measures are in place to secure those assets over time (EDUCAUSE,2010a) In addition, as growing numbers of higher education institutions move IT services to the cloud, there will be less need and demand for in-house IT staff to manage servers, databases, applications and resources.For today and tomorrow, in divergence, adoption of a cloud environment relieves the institution of the need to acquire an actual costly server in order to conduct research.

Cloud providers might need to be more transparent with their processes and will perhaps move toward the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that are acceptable to larger numbers of colleges and universities. At the same time, private clouds will evolve to meet the needs of institutions with unique or more stringent security requirements. Institutions will also explore the security implications for integrating cloud services with those hosted on campus (EDUCAUSE, 2010a).

Looking at others adopters in the higher education’s sphere worldwide, The Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of

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California atBerkeley had a first-hand dealing with this matter. They indicated that their lab “has benefited substantially from the ability to complete research by conference deadlines and adjust resources over the semester to accommodate course deadlines.” As adopters of cloud computing, they “were relieved of dealing with the twin dangers of over-provisioning and under provisioning theirinternal data centres”.

Successful adoption of cloud computing is key for realisation of benefits promised by cloud computing environment underline Armbrust et al (2009). As organisations are faced with the need for high processing capabilities, large storage capabilities, IT resource scalability and high availability, at the lowest possible cost, cloud computing becomes an attractive alternative ( Armbrust et al. 2009).

However, adoption of cloud in African universities has to be planned cautiously as different applications make different usage of resources like in any other environment.Before any major changes, a higher education institution like any other business industry must look into what they are potentially going to invest in. From the time when this field is still relatively new, it is strongly recommended that early African University adopters plan the transition with judgment and keep in close contact with organizations that establish industry standards, such as NIST, in order to ensure a uniform and smooth transition.

In terms of the implication of cloud computing, Sultan (2010) underscores that the impact of cloud in education has attracted researchers and countries attention all over the world especially due to technological implications of and open access to knowledge. The impact can also create tensions that are difficult to manage as well as changes that are often difficult to implement (Masud et al. 2012).

Conclusion On the very sunny side of things, universities across the globe saw improvement in at least one area of their IT department, and few reported a reduction in surplus and energy consumption particularly in Africa.

However, the reality is thatmany encounters of cloud computing for higher education relate to its relative newness and the underdevelopment of the marketplace for cloud services in the region.

The anticipation is that it will go through several changes in the future, in terms of resources, issues, risks, and ultimately best practices and standards.

However, there are some sought compensations that it

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can hypothetically provide value for institutions of higher education. On-demand services can resonate positively with the current university constrictedfinances across the continent.

The key question remains whether or not it makes sense from a business and from a strategic point of view to move to cloud computing and the answer is that it depends on various factors that have been mentioned above.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It is always a desire to thank those who made this paper possible. I owe my genuine gratitude and warmest appreciation to the following people, who, in any way have contributed and inspired me to the overall success of the undertaking: To Professor Jonathan Klaaren, for his guidance, support, encouragement and trust; ToTessa Murray, CRM manager at Wits University for her approval; to Dr. Avitus Agborfor the remarkable patience he exuded in perusing and deciphering my hardly legible manuscript.

To my wife Carine Ali, my kids Julien Leandre and Célline Leandra seke for their support and pure hospitality; finally to my colleagues through Kuzi Chikwava, who have been unselfishly extending their effort and understanding towards this work REFERENCES

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MBOUNGOU MOUYABI SEKE is an independent Partner & Consultant on a personal and private basis. He holds a Baccalaureate in Mechanical Engineering awarded in 2000 from the Technical College Poaty Bernard of Pointe Noire in the Republic of Congo. He also received a Technician Patent in Mechanical Engineering from Thomas Sankara Technical Institute. He received an Engineering degree in Biomedical Maintenance from the Tertiary Institute of Applied Techniques of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2004 and his dissertation was titled “The Establishment of Maintenance Policy in Hospitals of Developing Countries: Case of the Central Hospital of the Army Pierre Mobengo of Brazzaville”.

In 2008, he took Higher Diploma courses in Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was awarded with a postgraduate certificate in Information Technology Project Management in 2012 from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2013, he was awarded a Certificate in Computer auditing from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the Wits School of Law in July 2008, he worked as PC Engineer & Database Manager. He is currently a Constituent Relationship Management Officer within the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg and visiting associate to the Wits Law School where he served as a Senior Local Area Network Administrator.

He has presented papers at conferences and his recent publications include: •“E‐learning and M-learning, Africa’s search for a suitable concept in the era of cloud computing”; Published in the volume of International Journal of Social and Human Sciences 6 2012 & •“Virtual Desktops in Institutions of Higher education using VMware view”; Published in the second volume of the International Journal of Communication (IJC) Issue 1, March 2013.

His research interests focuses on Africa and include Cloud computing, Virtualization, E‐Learning, Big data, M‐Learning, Digital Clash of Civilization in the continent.

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