Editor's Note: General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasised at the National Conference on Education that the national education digitalisation initiative should be fully implemented, with efforts to expand the coverage of high-quality education resources and improve public services for lifelong learning.
The Open University of China (OUC) has thoroughly implemented the educational digitalisation strategy, actively promoted the deep integration of digital technology and education, and been committed to building a ubiquitous and accessible lifelong education system. It has carried out numerous beneficial explorations in digital empowerment for lifelong learning, achieving tangible results.
In recent years, the Open University of China (OUC) has applied big data analysis, visualisation, and monitoring and early warning technologies to comprehensively construct a data-sharing and data-application system suitable for the educational system.
This system provides large-scale, personalised, and precise data-driven business application services for educational system.
Currently, the OUC has accumulated 748TB of data across various information systems. To ensure the security of this vast amount of data, the Department of Digitalisation has developed a "Security Guardian"—a series of data security protection tools such as the API security monitoring platform, the database security auditing platform, and the bastion host have been launched. These tools standardise data processing activities, ensure data security, and promote the rational and effective use of data.
Parallel Monitoring and Analysis: Comprehensively Protecting the University’s API Security
The API security monitoring platform addresses issues such as unclear API asset management, lack of protection against vulnerability attacks, unawareness of sensitive data leakage, and absence of communication behaviour audits. It utilises technologies like API asset identification, sensitive data transmission identification, vulnerability attack detection and protection, and access control. The service deployment covers 49 core business systems, including enrolment, teaching and examination systems, with a total of 12,060 APIs and nearly 14.82 million requests monitored. Based on the operation of the API security monitoring platform, the Department of Digitalisation publishes monthly data security analysis reports and has successfully resolved 118 data security issues.
Precise Security Through Security Auditing: Strengthening the Data Security Barrier
The database security auditing platform enables data operation audits, abnormal database behaviour detection and warning, data security risk assessment and reporting, and monitoring of sensitive data access, with a cumulative monitoring of 5.1 billion data operations. It automatically identifies sensitive data in traffic, effectively enhancing the OUC’s data security management from the source, thereby promoting data development and utilisation, ensuring university’s data security, and protecting the legal rights of individuals and the university.
Bastion Host for Full Process Monitoring: Precise Cloud Account and Password Management
Bastion host provides full process monitoring to regulate the management of accounts and passwords for R&D and maintenance personnel accessing cloud resources. This effectively prevents unauthorised access and ensures data security from the aspects of operation processes and technical means through the standardised implementation of management mechanisms such as legally-authorised data access.
Moving forward, the OUC will continue to strengthen the full-lifecycle data security protection system, enhance data security supervision, and improve data security guarantee capabilities. This will provide a solid security foundation for building a safe, orderly, and efficient data ecosystem, while also protecting the personal information data security for teachers and students, thereby jointly fortifying the digital education security barrier.
By Department of Digitalisation