Sustainable Development: What have we learnt from the pandemic?

Participation of Information Technology DepartmentThe Information Technology Department of the University of Technology and Applied Science-Ibri participated in the UTAS-SurAnnualConference2021 Sustainable Development: What have we learnt from the pandemic? on 11 and 12 April 2021. The programme started with a keynote by speaker Dr RaminMohajer, PhD., M.B.A. Advisor to the MTCIT, Sultanate of Oman. The conference included different themes which are Biology and Biotechnology, Information Technology, Business Management, Communication Technology, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Linguistics and Education. Around 24 papers were presented in the conference. The contribution of the Information TechnologyDepartment of UTAS-Ibri was mainly focused on the networking and cybersecurity domain.

The department participated in two papers. Nasim Al Balushi (Lecturer) presented her paper titled “Impact of Covid-19 on Cybersecurity in Oman”. The abstract of her paper is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine our life without the Internet. Despite the importance and benefits of the Internet, Internet connections are vulnerable to many threats; the number of phishing sites, spoofing of social networking sites, and other attacks have increased annually. As well as due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of people are depending on the internet for doing their works, education, business, etc. The COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for security specialists. Cybercrimes increase and the investigations for the crimes become a challenge for the investigators. It is very necessary to figure out the impact of COVID-19 on cybersecurity and the difficulties of the investigation and improve it, as cybercrimes can cause damage or loss of sensitive information.”

Ms Roselle Salazar-Solitario (Lecturer) presented a paper titled “Investigation of IT Infrastructure Management for Sustainability Amidst a Pandemic and Beyond”. The abstract of the presented paper is that IT infrastructure management includes activities such as hardware maintenance, software upgrades and the administration of networks and servers to ensure continuity of business operations. In educational institutions, technology managers see to it that the existing IT infrastructure can sufficiently support seamless class activities and other tasks that require the use of computers and network services. The fast evolution of technology in education has been making the technology support teams occupied with their jobs but the major challenge came when the Covid-19 pandemic reached its peak during the previous academic year. At the height of the pandemic, government-imposed lockdowns have forced educational institutions around the world to make a sudden shift from on-campus to online mode of teaching. Consequently, technology teams have to keep up with the newer challenge of supporting both onsite and remote users who simultaneously access the IT resources. This paper investigated the strategies adopted by the technology managers to support remote work/classes in the previous academic year and how they addressed the technical issues encountered during the transition period- from on-campus to online classes and assessments. The empirical case study approach was used in conjunction with a focused group questionnaire for the data collection and analysis. The authors identified three classifications of technical support issues reported during online classes, namely, 1) issues related to online teaching tools, 2) compatibility issues between computers and the teaching software required for online classes, and 3) non-technical issues due to lecturers’ non-familiarity to online teaching tools.  The results showed that the technical issues were addressed and improvements in the infrastructure were adopted afterwards.  Finally, owing to the lessons learnt throughout this study, this paper proposes implementing the following Industrial Revolution Technology (IR4) solutions to improve sustainability: 1) Edge Computing via Private Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for high availability and security of access to contents; and 2) On-Demand Computing for load balancing and efficient bandwidth utilisation.