KENET has been offering data centre and community cloud services since 2011 when its two data centres at the University of Nairobi (UoN) and United States International University- Africa (USIU- Africa) were commissioned. The data centre services include Server(s)/Rack colocation in the data centres for hosting of institutional systems, web applications, and disaster recovery sites among others.
The KENET Virtual Lab is a research cloud computing platform where researchers can spin up pre-configured virtual appliances on demand, as well as store and share data. Prof. Elijah Ateka, an Associate Professor of Plant Virology in the Department of Horticulture at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) collaborates with Dr. Laura Boykin from the University of Western Australia (UWA) in a gene sequencing project.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are open to the public. This implies that these materials can be legally accessed, copied, used and re-shared by anyone. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation. OER can therefore be termed as a global movement in education spanning many countries and initiatives to ensure that education is a right and not a privilege.
The Open Science Workshop hosted at KENET successfully concluded on August 10, 2018. The two-day workshop organized by the Bioinformatics Network led by Dr.
The KENET research services team had an opportunity to meet with researchers from International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) to better understand their research infrastructure needs and create awareness of some of KENET research services.
The pool of researchers in Kenya is increasing both in digit and diversity. Although the largest research output in the country between 2016- 2017 was in the field of medicine, research in other fields is on the rise such as econometrics, bioinformatics, computational biology/chemistry, engineering, physics and data science. Big Data (extreme large data sets) calls for more computing power for data analysis and storage.
The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is one of the most important public institutions in Kenya. One of the apparent reasons is because the wildlife-oriented tourism sector is among the top contributors to the Country’s GDP. Cognizant of this, the Kenya Wildlife Training Institute (KWSTI) provides special training in Natural Resource Management and Tourism Development.
Member Institutions can now register their domain name directly through the KENET portal. On February 22, 2018, KENET launched the DOT KE (.ke) domain registration portal, https://domain.kenet.or.ke/. Any member of the KENET community can register and pay online for any DOT KE domains of their choice including the newly launched second level DOT KE domains (e.g. www.mycampus.ac.ke).
Cloud computing is one of the digital platforms that more Institutions should embrace. Whether in the education or research field, cloud computing progresses the very fundamentals of learning and research. More choice in education in terms of diversity of courses and method of instruction is being offered in many Kenyan Universities. However, cloud computing is being adopted at a sluggish pace, yet the advantages of cloud computing in education and research is copious.
