Natalya Kaspersky, President of InfoWatch Group, has held a business meeting with government officials of the Emirate of Ajman (UAE), attended by H.E. Ohoud Ali Shehail, Director General of Ajman Digital Government; Wejdan Eissa Alhajaj, Director for Projects and Strategy; Haitham Yaish, Associate Professor at the Ajman University of Science and Technology; and Kristina Tantsyura, CEO of InfoWatch Gulf. The parties discussed the fostering of skilled IT specialists and opportunities for joint cybersecurity education and advanced training initiatives in the UAE.
According to H.E. Ohoud Ali Shehail, international cooperation and the use of global best practices helped the UAE achieve a great success in government digitalization: “We can definitely benefit from Russia’s experience in the training of hi-tech professionals and have already discussed with InfoWatch and Higher School of Economics a joint opportunity for creating a high-quality IT education model in the Emirate of Ajman.”
Natalya Kaspersky told the attendees that InfoWatch Gulf, a Middle East representative office of InfoWatch Group, is creating a training center in the UAE to offer its regional partners cybersecurity training programs developed together with Russian leading universities.
“Enterprise information security is a rather new sector for the UAE that calls for highly qualified experts,” said Natalya Kaspersky. “Due to the UAE economy modernization and digital transformation, our cybersecurity and training products are very popular with our local partners who increasingly trust in Russian solutions, expertise, and best practices.”
Moreover, the representatives of the Emirate of Ajman and InfoWatch experts met with specialists from National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) to discuss further collaboration in education programs, R&D, and inter-university student exchange.
“The Emirate delegation members got interested in the HSE programs in IT and smart city architectures,” said Ivan Prostakov, Vice Rector for International Activities, National Research University Higher School of Economics. “We are going to continue the consultations with the Emirate government and Ajman University, offering them blockchain, e-government, Big Data, and City of the Future prototyping programs, as well as our joint educational initiative with InfoWatch on advanced training and certification of the Emirate officials in cybersecurity, IoT, Big Data and Data Science domains.”
It should be noted that in 2017 InfoWatch Group opened a basic academic department at HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM HSE), contributed to the creation of the IoT and Cyber-physical Systems master's program and launched a scholarship program for cybersecurity students.
As part of their stay in Russia, the Emirate delegation also visited Moscow Innovations Agency, Skolkovo Technology Park and attended International BIS Summit SPb 2018.
About
Ajman Digital Government is an executive authority of the Emirate of Ajman (UAE) that directly reports to the ruler of the Emirate of Ajman His Highness Sheikh Humaid Bin Rashid Al Nuaimi and is responsible for digital transformation of government services in the Emirate, with 30 e-government services to be rolled out in 2017-2022 and accessible 24/7. https://ajman.ae/en/node/104
