FINAL WORD
Nokia helping to enable Digital Transformation for smarter higher education institutions
As the rate of digitalisation continues to gain pace across many industries , educational institutions are exploring how they can modernise their existing infrastructure in order to get ahead . But there are many different sets of requirements and priorities that these organisations should seriously consider , as Mahmoud El-Banna , Head of Digital Industries , MEA at Nokia , tells us here .
As digitalisation efforts continue unabated across industries , higher education institutions are increasingly seeing a need to digitise their services and operations both on and off-campus with the aim of pursuing the journey towards Education 4.0 and beyond .
With a continued focus on being able to access services and content digitally , these institutions will have to evolve their communication and IT infrastructure to offer highperforming services to allow students , academic staff , researchers and operations teams to achieve more productivity .
New services and operational applications will require a different set of capabilities that the current infrastructure won ’ t support or will support with limitations . Reliability , security , coverage , multi-user capacity and mobility are considered key requirements for these new services to operate .
To keep pace with new demands and get the most from their infrastructure , higher education institutions will therefore be urged to design and deploy a holistic and integrated infrastructure solution that includes a technology stack composed of Wi- Fi , private LTE / 5G using either private or public spectrum , robust passive optical LAN networks and potentially a secure IoT management layer .
These solutions have different capabilities for different use cases and applications ; therefore , they should determine which technology is best suited to their needs .
74 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com