Academic City, Accra organized its international conference on Information Security and E-Business on 22nd February at Academic City Auditorium. Jointly hosted by NIIT Ghana – leader in ICT education across the world and SMU Ghana – Five Decades in the field of higher education, this international conference was organized to provide a platform for various stakeholders to discuss e-business and technologies for securing online information.
The event was patronized by members of the academic Diaspora and students from both the institutions and was chaired by the Chairman of Academic City, Dr. Kapil Gupta who was the Chief Patron of the conference. Prof Osei Darkwa – President GTUC was the chief Guest for the occasion. Representatives from various government agencies, including Ministry of Works and Housing, Youth and Sports, and Communications also participated in the conference apart from media representatives.
With the convergence of Information and Communication Technologies, the ICT industry continues to grow like no other. Technologies such as the Cloud Computing, Smartphone applications, Next Generation Networks (NGN) and high-speed broadband among others, have bridged the digital divide by opening doors to unprecedented growth in outsourcing, e-business and massive cost savings in infrastructure investments on one hand while contributing to e-learning, collaboration and information sharing among administrators, educators and IT professionals on the other. It has also posed numerous challenges in terms of IT security risks, digitization challenges, management of social media and the need to continually set and upgrade industry standards.
Speaking on the occasion, Chairman Dr. Kapil Gupta discussed about various categories of E-business and the security methods used to make the transactions secured. He explained that while E-business is the way to go for most firms, there are various issues that need to be taken care of. Primary among them is Information Security. E-Business systems naturally have greater security risks than traditional business systems; therefore it is important for e-business systems to be fully protected against these risks for the confidential information to stay secure. Hackers are one of the great threats to the security of e-businesses. Some common security concerns for e-Businesses include keeping business and customer information private and confidential, authenticity of data, and data integrity. He shared some of the methods of protecting e-business security and keeping information secure, which includes physical security measures as well as data storage, data transmission, anti-virus software, firewalls, and encryption to list a few. So, it’s widely accepted that that E-business has given birth to the one of the fastest growing fields namely the Information Security.
Chief Guest for the occasion, Prof. Osei Darkwa, President Ghana Technology University College, discussed on the usage technological advancements for the development of the continent and various opportunities available in the field of Information Security and E-business.
Papers were presented by experts from various countries in the field of Information Security, e-Banking, e-Library, Cloud Computing, E-Learning etc. highlighting the impact of ICT on Business processes and Education.
Resource persons from banking and security also shared their experience in the field of IT security and ethical hacking respectively, which were widely applauded by the participants.
