Strathmore Univeristy’s @iLabAfrica has unveiled East and Central Africa’s first hands-on studio-assisted training academy for digital security.
For the launch, @iLabAfrica has collaborated with Egypt’s SoftLock in the initiative establish the digital security academy that will feature state-of-the-art studios for high-level hands-on information security training and research.
Dr Joseph Sevilla, the director of @iLabAfrica, says the new academy will support capacity development for critical data and information protection, a key source of insecurity and financial losses for governments and enterprises in the region.
“We set out to establish a world class cyber security training academy to offer hands on training to experts in sensitive fields a while back and today we are happy to launch the Strathmore- Softlock Digital Security Academy, thanks to our collaboration with Softlock, a security solutions company with a global reputation,” said Sevilla.
A significant fraction of the training – over 90% – at the Academy will be hands-on.
The launch was witnessed by among others senior officials from the Kenya Vision 2030 and representatives from the Kenya ICT Authority.
Mr.Abdulrahman Al-kassar, a senior manager at SoftLock Security said the Academy had invested heavily in research and collaboration tools to ensure currency and synching with evolving cyber security techniques. “This is possibly the most advanced such training curricular and centre in East and Central Africa,” he said adding the threats to information security have continued to mutate.
The academy’s curricular targets high level officers in enterprises including chief information officers, information security managers, system administrators and IT experts.
“Defense information experts, sensitive data security managers and cyber police will benefit from training at the facility,” he said. The government and enterprises in Kenya have increased efforts in building information security capacity following increased cyber attacks and compromise of information systems by hackers with unknown motives based inside and outside the country.
iLabAfrica runs specialised research and trainings and collaborates with various corporate organisations. Its IT Sourcing Centre has collaborations with Samsung Electronics, Alkira Ltd of Australia, Danutech of Ireland and Climate Pal Kenya Limited. At the E-Learning centre, @iLabAfrica is working with the IBM Research lab for big data and also hosts the Safaricom Academy.
Among other global companies that have elaborate research, projects and training collaborations with @iLabAfrica include Google, Ericsson Kenya, HP, Intel and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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