The Ethiopian Education and Research Network (EthERNet), is set to become the country’s first government institution to provide a new cloud service to its members as it plan to launch an education cloud service that will be available for public universities in the country in the next two months.
The NREN, a member of UbuntuNet Alliance, announced on its website in February 2017 that it will soon launch Education as a Service (EaaS), a cloud service that allows students to chose and learn specific courses from programmes being offered by universities via their electronic devices.
According to the website, the NREN will introduce the service after getting 1.2 billion Birr ($525,000) from the Ethiopian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MICT) for the rolling out of the exercise.
The EaaS will join a list of services on EthERNet’s portfolio. Other services currently being offered by the NREN include DNS, Web and Shared Hosting, Identity Management, Digital Repository and other technical support services.
According to EthERNet more new cloud services including Arc Geographic Information System, (GIS) and Graduate Verication System (GVS) will be tested soon in readiness for implementation.
EthERNet was founded in 2009 under the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education with the aim of supporting public higher education institutions. The NREN runs and maintains a 10g high speed fibre network connectivity for its member institutions.