This is the opinion of Abdullah Shariff, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s (UKZN) director for Infrastructure, Networks and Communications. “As custodians of ICT, we’ve taken centre stage and this is likely to remain this way for the foreseeable future,” says Shariff. “IT can be seen as making false promises in terms of what is possible, but it was a proud moment when we enabled the university to successfully complete the 2020 academic programme.

“I think that very few organisations were prepared and many were caught by surprise, but we demonstrated our agility and resilience. Within four days, we had our technology plan in place and had set out on our road map to tackle the different areas encompassing teaching, learning, research and infrastructure. We were fortunate in that we had a technology refresh in 2019 and from an IT infrastructure perspective we were ready to have around 60 000 concurrently connected users to our VPN Gateway.”