Abstract

Cloud computing is an emerging solution that responds to the concept of Smart University; it aims at offering an intelligent environment of business continuity for the actors of an educational center. This research offers a recovery plan of educational services in case of disaster, through an action research, which analyzed free software for cloud computing, focusing on Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS). To achieve this, the implementation was placed in a local scenario (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP, LAMP), and stress tests were performed on three applications: Nextcloud, Seafile and Pydio. Nextcloud had more consistent and better results than the other two applications; however, it lacks a system that allows synchronizing two Nextcloud instances. To solve this, we developed a routine aimed at providing an environment that monitors the hot site where the application is hosted and, from time to time, synchronize the instance to avoid data loss during disaster events. Afterwards, we configured a second application on a cold site that is alert to a possible service breakdown, so it can respond and sent immediate alerts. Finally, the usability of the routine was evaluated, and the disaster recovery plan for the EFSS was assembled, to offer a continuity of the educational services that are running in these environments.

Highlights

  • The inclusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has taken a slow and uneven pace, both for their economic and human resources

  • The present study focused on the recovery of services in educational environments, such as storage, communications, sharing, and file synchronization, by combining elements of the computational cloud supported by the Smart Education theory, such as the Synchronization and Use systems: Shared Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS)

  • The rest of the article has been organized as follows: section 2 describes the state of art; section 3 synthesizes the applied research methods and techniques, as well as the activities carried out to bring the work to a successful conclusion; section 4 details the quantitative evaluation of the EFSS platforms; section 5 explains the start-up of the experiment; section 6 describes the experimental results of the EFSS implementations, and the execution of the developed routine in two EFSS instances, the measurement of the quality of use of the routine, and the discussion of the results obtained; section 7 presents the conclusions and lines of future work based on the obtained results

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Summary

Introduction

The inclusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has taken a slow and uneven pace, both for their economic and human resources. The present study focused on the recovery of services in educational environments, such as storage, communications, sharing, and file synchronization, by combining elements of the computational cloud supported by the Smart Education theory, such as the Synchronization and Use systems: Shared Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) This allows us to respond to the particularities observed in disaster situations, such as the devastating earthquake of April 16, 2016, which left the education sector in the province of Manabí (Ecuador) out of operation due to the lack of a recovery plan in these eventualities of force majeure. The rest of the article has been organized as follows: section 2 describes the state of art; section 3 synthesizes the applied research methods and techniques, as well as the activities carried out to bring the work to a successful conclusion; section 4 details the quantitative evaluation of the EFSS platforms; section 5 explains the start-up of the experiment; section 6 describes the experimental results of the EFSS implementations, and the execution of the developed routine in two EFSS instances, the measurement of the quality of use of the routine, and the discussion of the results obtained; section 7 presents the conclusions and lines of future work based on the obtained results

Related work
Research design
Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the EFSS
Experimentation with EFSS in the recovery environment in case of disaster
Test plan
Results of EFSS
Verification of usability
Usability of the routine
Discussion
Conclusions and Future Work
Full Text
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