Services

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Connectivity

  • Core Business of the Alliance
  • Procure and operate our own network
  • Points of Presence (PoPs) in the countries. The NRENs take over from there and run the national backbone
  • Different offers: Regional REN Connectivity, Global Transit Delivered in Africa or Europe
  • eduroam is a wireless roaming platform facilitating access at participating institutions

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DOI Registration

Open science encompasses unhindered access to scientific articles, access to data from public research, and collaborative research enabled by ICT tools and incentives. It aims at making research output and data locatable, identifiable and citable. In order to achieve this, persistent identifiers called Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to research output and data. UbuntuNet Alliance supports open science and is a Consortium Organization Member for Datacite, a leading global provider of DOIs. Through this membership, UbuntuNet Alliance enables research and education institutions that have institutional repositories to register and manage DOIs and metadata for their research outputs.

Relevance

  • DOIs ensure that research output is locatable, identifiable and findable on the internet.
  • It is easy to create and manage DOIs and metadata using the Datacite Fabrica, an online portal
  • Easy integration of Datacite Fabrica with Institutional Repository for exchange of metadata

Delivery Model

To benefit from this service, an organisation needs to join the UbuntuNet Datacite Consortium, which automatically enables the organisation’s membership to Datacite. Membership is open to all research and education institutions in Eastern and Southern Africa.

An organisation’s account is created on Datacite Fabrica where the Organisation can create and manage DOIs and metadata for their research output. A test account is also created for the organisation to freely give the service a test run before creating in the production environment.

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Sectigo SSL Certificate Service

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are digital certificates that authenticate a website’s identity and enable an encrypted communication channel between a client and server. They are cryptographic protocols that ensure secure communication between a client and a server with the former now deprecated. It enables websites to move from HTTP to the secure HTTPS. The SSL certificate contains the website’s public key and identity information and is kept at the server in addition to the secret and secure private key. A client references this certificate file to retrieve the public key that is used to verify the identity of the server.

Sectigo (SSL certificate provider) and UbuntuNet Alliance are in partnership to offer low-cost certificates to Research and Education institutions in East, Central and South Africa. This builds on the EI4Africa project with major updates in the support services and setup that gives organizations more control over issuance and management of SSL certificates.

 Relevance

  • Ensures web transactions and data are kept secure through encryption
  • Enables clients to verify the identity and ownership of a web server and/or domain
  • Build/enhance customer trust in visiting a website
  • Dedicated Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM) for an institution
  • Sectigo direct support according to the plan (Standard/Premium)
  • Lowest prices on the market
  • Integration with SAML 2.0 identity sources (Identity Federations)

 Delivery Model

A.   Dedicated SCM

In this model, an NREN with direct support from Sectigo is created a dedicated SCM and granted the top-most role of Master Registration Authority (MRAO). The MRAO can then create organizations (institutions) each with a role of Registration Authority Officer (RAO) to manage certificates at this level. The RAO can then create departments (units) with the role of Department Registration Authority Officer (DRAO) to manage certificates at departmental level. UbuntNet Alliance will play the role of intermediary between the NREN and Sectigo.

 B.   Shared SCM

This model closely follows the Dedicated SCM but with UbuntuNet Alliance acting as a catch-all especially for institutions that would like to trial the service or have few SSL certificate requests. UbuntuNet Alliance will act as the MRAO and create the organizations. The management hierarchy will then take the RAO to DRAO roles as depicted in A. The support requests are logged to UbuntuNet Alliance which takes charge of possible escalation matrix to resolve the issues.

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Managed IdP

Under AfricaConnect 2, Ubuntunet Alliance and Wacren acquired and runs a hosted identity service in eduID (https://eduid.africa). This service is a Software as a service (SaaS) and an on-premise platform that allows NREN and institutional administrators to manage organizational users. It is a crucial point for trust and identity services because it simplifies the web interface by intuitively taking the infrastructure and federation-related setups to the background. This makes it easy to bootstrap an institution to an identity federation and also acts as an identity source for the network access roaming service, eduroam. UbuntuNet Alliance has now embarked on continuous improvement and support of this service for production-grade use and has transformed it into the Managed IdP service.

Relevance

  • Easy administration of the user data base and/or organization units via an intuitive web interface
  • Wider service access base due to the easy integration of the IdP with major SAML-based service providers
  • Easy integration with eduroam for global network access
  • Support in use, installation/configuration and feature updates as and when released by the developers.

Delivery Model

There are two delivery modes of the service:

1. Hosted Platform

In this model, UbuntuNet Alliance manages the platform and cloud infrastructure supporting the service and is tasked with updates, support, replication, backup and general Quality of Service (QoS) attributes. The infrastructure is shared with other institutions on the platform but permissions scoped to prevent cross-organizational access.

2. On-Premise

The institution hosts the service within its computing infrastructure premises and UbuntuNet Alliance provides support in setup and updates to ensure its effective and optimal operation.

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Capacity Building

  • Training
  • Direct Engineering Assistance
  • CEO Seminar

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Cloud

  • AutoPilot
  • Fog
  • Web Hosting

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Collaboration

  • Rocket.Chat
  • Wiki
  • Discourse Forum
  • Real-Time Collaboration
  • Service Desk

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Data Management

  • Repository
  • FileSender
  • eduDrive
  • Bitbucket

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Operations

  • Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure
  • Central Logging Facilities
  • Software Repository with Access Control
  • Service Desk Software
  • Wiki for Documentation

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UbuntuNet-Connect2024 -
October 31-November 1, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania​

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