Tunisia’s CCK Builds New Digital Infrastructure for Smart Education, Unlocking the “Gateway to the Future”

Situated at the northernmost point of the African continent, Tunisia is emerging as a digital innovation hub in North Africa. As part of its 2025 Digital Economy Development Plan, the country is advancing digital transformation across multiple sectors, leading to a growing demand for digital talents. In response to this trend, Tunisia is actively promoting the development of digital platforms and educational information systems in higher education. These initiatives are enabling researchers, teachers, and students to better utilize technology for learning, maximize resource efficiency, bridge the digital divide, and assist policymakers and educators in making informed decisions that enhance the quality of education and accelerate the growth of smart education.

Established in 1976, the Khawarizmi Computing Center (CCK), under the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, has been dedicated to providing high-quality computing, networking, and related services to the education sector and higher education institutions. These efforts are aimed at continuously improving teaching and learning experiences, supporting educational equity and security, and ultimately nurturing future talent. To further strengthen digital infrastructure and foster collaboration across sectors, CCK has partnered with Huawei to build a robust cloud infrastructure, focusing on computing, networking, storage, and backup. In the networking domain, CCK has leveraged cutting-edge technologies like fiber optics and SD-WAN to create high-performance networks, ensuring reliable data transmission between various data centers. Building on this foundation, many universities in Tunisia are deepening their collaboration with Huawei on ICT talent development, injecting ongoing momentum into the growth of the digital economy. Through these efforts, CCK is playing a key role in driving Tunisia’s digital transformation in education, positioning the education sector as both a pioneer and leader in the country’s digital economy.

Accelerating Smart Education: The Urgent Need to Break Digital Infrastructure Bottlenecks

The "The Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030)" clearly outlines that for Africa to integrate digital technology into education, it must connect universities, vocational training institutions, and secondary schools across the continent with broadband internet. Meanwhile, the increasing use of artificial intelligence and other technologies in education has heightened the demands on digital infrastructure, including computing and networking capabilities.

To better support the growing number of smart education applications, CCK urgently needs to enhance its cloud infrastructure to facilitate remote learning, smart classrooms, and research innovation in universities. In particular, when assisting schools in building data centers, CCK must address challenges related to unified management, ensuring secure and efficient data transmission between centers. This includes enabling real-time data migration, disaster recovery, and synchronization to improve data security.

At the same time, CCK must upgrade its network infrastructure to provide greater bandwidth, faster speeds, and lower latency. Currently, the lack of effective visualization tools for educational network management hinders CCK’s ability to ensure service quality, control network traffic, and manage numerous sites. Tunisia also faces new challenges in enhancing the security and reliability of its educational networks.

In response to these new needs and challenges, CCK is accelerating the development of a new digital infrastructure to drive the digital transformation of education. Additionally, by building high-performance networks, CCK aims to meet the demands for higher bandwidth, faster speeds, and lower latency while improving network security and reliability, and advancing the automation and intelligence of network operations and maintenance.

Innovative Technology Integration to Build a New Digital Infrastructure

To align with the evolving trends in digital technology and address both current and future demands on digital infrastructure in education, CCK has partnered with Huawei to carry out a comprehensive upgrade of its traditional IT infrastructure. Huawei’s continuous innovations and technological expertise in areas such as cloud computing, SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), and Wi-Fi 7, along with its extensive experience in the education sector, are well-positioned to meet CCK’s digital infrastructure development needs.

In terms of cloud platform development, Huawei CloudStack offers a secure, compliant solution while ensuring the continuous evolution of cloud services. Backed by extensive practical experience and robust product solutions, Huawei CloudStack enables Tunisia to rapidly and comprehensively build digital capabilities in the cloud, supporting a wide range of smart education innovations. Additionally, Huawei’s Cloud Server Disaster Recovery (CSDR) service provides remote disaster recovery protection, allowing CCK to restore protected ECS/BMS in case of a data center disaster at a remote site.

In network channel construction, Huawei’s fiber optic products and services can cover all sites within Tunisia’s education network, enabling on-demand bandwidth upgrades and ensuring efficient data transmission. Compared to traditional copper-based cabling, fiber optics offer significantly higher bandwidth, with capacities of up to 100 Tbps, ensuring that a single installation can meet the education sector's needs for the next 30 years.

For network construction, Huawei’s SD-WAN solution provides real-time, detailed network insights, making network traffic visible, controllable, and manageable. By deploying SD-WAN, CCK enables seamless interconnectivity among Tunisia's universities, and by utilizing MPLS links, it further enhances network security and stability.

Regarding network security, Huawei’s comprehensive security solutions empower CCK to strengthen its network security measures, ensuring the protection of network services. Additionally, through Huawei’s iMaster NCE-Campus intelligent management and operations platform, CCK can achieve rapid network deployment, centralized management, and smart operations and maintenance, dramatically boosting operational efficiency.

Moreover, to support Tunisia’s universities in cultivating ICT talent, Huawei has collaborated with numerous institutions to launch a master’s program in network security, offering specialized courses and internships. By co-establishing network security laboratories, equipped with SecoManager hardware and software and Huawei’s USG6510 firewall, Huawei further drives ICT talent development. In addition, Huawei has introduced a comprehensive ICT talent development program for Tunisian universities, creating a full-circle talent pipeline from learning to certification to employment.

Comprehensive Digital Infrastructure Upgrade Accelerates the Digital Transformation of Education

CCK has successfully built an efficient, stable, and reliable digital infrastructure foundation for Tunisia’s education sector. This infrastructure not only provides robust support for smart education applications, such as intelligent collaboration, smart classrooms, and campus security, while significantly reducing operational costs and complexity, but also enables full optical network connectivity between universities, greatly enhancing the overall network experience. Furthermore, CCK can dynamically adjust network bandwidth as needed to improve service quality, all while ensuring network security.

Leveraging Huawei CloudStack’s secure, reliable, and efficient platform, CCK has established the MESRS cloud infrastructure. This platform allows universities to build virtual data centers (VDCs), integrate IT infrastructure and data assets, streamline management processes, and safeguard data security. Additionally, it offers services such as VDI cloud desktops, ERP hosting, video conferencing, and online learning platforms. These services not only support educational and research innovation but also facilitate the transition from basic cloud adoption to deeper cloud utilization, further advancing the digital transformation of universities.

In terms of talent development, Huawei has actively promoted industry-education integration by incorporating the Huawei HCIA Security certification into school curricula, ensuring graduates possess the foundational skills required for security engineering roles. By 2023, Huawei had signed ICT Academy agreements with 68 institutions in Tunisia, with over 7,600 students participating in Huawei’s training courses and more than 750 earning Huawei certifications. Additionally, Huawei has supported 15 startup projects through its Spark Competition and fostered entrepreneurship and employment opportunities for students through initiatives such as the annual ICT Talent Competition and the Seeds for the Future program.

Tunisia is now pushing forward with a nationwide digital transformation across various sectors, harnessing ICT innovation to drive socio-economic growth and positioning itself as a regional leader in digital transformation and talent development. Through its deep collaboration with Huawei, Tunisia is not only accelerating the digital transformation of its education sector but also ensuring equitable and secure access to education, enhancing the learning experience for students, fostering ICT talent, and injecting sustained momentum into the innovative development of its digital economy.