Presentation given at the Ankabut Users Meeting at the American University of Sharjah

1. Ankabut Users’ Meeting
Innovation-Implementation-Impact
Oct 2, 2013

2. UAE Higher Education CIO Council
Agenda
1.
2.
3.
4.
Overview of the UAE HE CIO Council
Examples of Collaboration
How to Join the Council
Q&A with the Audience

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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.

8. CIO Council Members

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. eduroam: EPFL, AUS and KUSTAR
eduroam
eduroam
eduroam
eduroam
Wireless roaming
over
eduroam®
• Use your home-university credentials everywhere
• Internet access
• Secure access (802.1X)
eduroam

13. eduroam: EPFL, AUS and KUSTAR
Radius-based infrastructure
ETLR1+2 (Netherland and Denmark)
UAE FLR (EPFL ME): 91.198.19.151
FLR
AuthN
EPFL
Radius
EPFL
AuthN
AUS
Radius
AUS
AuthN
server L
Radius
server L
EPFL
Network
EPFL
AUS
Network
AUS
IdP
Network
X
AuthN
server M
Radius
server M
Network
Y
eduroam
User EPFL
ETLRS : European Top-Level Radius Server
FLR
: Federation (national) top level Radius proxy Server

14. 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

15. 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

16. Questions

17. 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