Information Technology (IT) Department

Information Technology is the core of any organization, and GIK Institute also recognizes its importance in education. Being a fully residential campus, the Institute understands the importance of facilitating round-the-clock connectivity, access to digital resources and computing services, and other information and communication facilities. The IT Department at GIK Institute is responsible for providing students, faculty, staff, and residents with the technological resources to support the Institute’s vision and mission of imparting high-quality education and providing excellent teaching and research environment. To fulfill this objective, the IT Department provides a conducive IT infrastructure campus-wide for teaching, learning, and research. More specifically, the following services are provided by the IT Department at GIK Institute.

1. Data Center: GIK Institute has its own IT Infrastructure for which a Data Center has been established on the campus for providing IT facilities to its faculty, staff, students and residents of the campus. The services include round the clock redundant Internet connectivity, local and external email using Microsoft Office365, website hosting, and high performance computing servers. The Data Center has state of the art facilities which includes next-generation firewall, high-end routers, core switch and power backup using UPS and power generator.

2. Connectivity: GIK Institute has acquired the Internet bandwidth from two different service providers, namely, the Pakistan Education & Research Network (PERN) and PTCL. PERN provides high speed Internet and intranet facilities to GIK Institute. The intranet service provides the features of HEC Digital Library to assist the students in their research and academic activities. PERN is currently providing a bandwidth of 500 Mbps, while PTCL is providing 330 Mbps.

3. LAN and Wi-Fi: The IT Department provides both wired and wireless gigabit network connectivity to the entire campus that connects all the academic departments, hostels, central library, administrative departments, lecture halls, auditorium, guest house, and residences. All buildings, including the academic blocks, administration block, faculty club, guest house, sports complex, medical center, hostels and residential area are connected to the Date Center using fiber optic cables. Ethernet connectivity is provided within all buildings and approximately 200 campus-wide Wi-Fi access points are deployed for roaming free Internet access.

4. HPC: The high performance computing facility is located at the Data Center. The facility consists of 160 CPU cores, 1024 GPU cores, 10GB Ethernet switch Interconnection and 640 GB RAM. The facility is aimed at serving highly compute intensive research projects not only for the faculty and students of GIK Institute but also for the higher education sector country-wide through PERN.

5. Smart Classrooms: Information and Communication Technology tools have made a great impact in delivery of higher education by enabling faculty and students to enhance their capabilities in teaching, learning and research practices. Hence, it is inevitable for the universities to improve the ICT infrastructure and to encourage and exploit the e-resources and communication facilities among the stakeholders. Provision of smart classrooms is one such facility that enhances the qualities of teaching and learning to make them more innovative and enjoyable. GIK has acquired smart classroom solutions for its lecture halls. These smart facilities offer the most advanced interactive digital boards, AI enabled tracking cameras, lecture recorders, along with other additional equipment. The facility offers students highly interactive classroom environment with a provision of attending lectures and scholarly sessions in a blended mode at the campus and from anywhere outside the campus.

6. CCTV: Safe and secure environment for students, faculty and staff at GIK is of utmost priority. Therefore, GIK has placed special emphasis on the security and surveillance of the campus so as to make it safe and secure for the whole community. Dedicated IP surveillance CCTV cameras and command and control system are one of the primary secure-campus strategies which prevents from both internal and external threats and provide strict security protocols within the campus. IP surveillance cameras have been installed across the campus, inside and around the faculty buildings, administration block, hostels, and along the boundary walls, along with a central command and control system. Campus security addresses all kinds of challenges including prevention of violence, managing students’ diversity, maintaining access control check points and 24/7 surveillance.

7. Website and Social media: The IT Department is responsible for the design and development of the GIK website, its hosting, maintenance, search engine optimization, content management, design and layout, analytics and reporting, and collaboration with stakeholders to keep the website current. The IT Department also manages the official Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. In addition, the department maintains an official admissions Facebook group. The responsibilities include content creation, devising social media marketing and strategy, GIKI brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, audience management and engagement, social media analytics, reporting, and advertisement, and collaborating with the stakeholders to keep the GIKI social media up to date and achieve different institute targets related to admissions, career fairs, and open houses.

8. Campus Management System:  IT Department maintains the Institute’s campus management system (CMS), and provides technical support to faculty and students via CMS focal persons and admissions department. The responsibilities also include technical support in semester offering and conclusion, focal persons’ training and support, analytics and reporting, and coordination with the stakeholders.

9. Digital Library: HEC National Digital Library is a program to provide researchers within public and private universities in Pakistan and non-profit research and development organizations with access to international scholarly literature based on electronic delivery, providing access to high quality, peer-reviewed journals, databases, articles and e-books across a wide range of disciplines. The e-books support program allows researchers to access text and reference books electronically in a variety of subject areas. Around 75,000 number of electronic content has been made available through the Digital Library Program. GIK Institute has a rich collection of e-books which are accessible within the campus. These books are related to a variety of subjects, such as computer hardware & software engineering, engineering sciences, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and humanities/management science, and are accessible through the intranet. GIK also has a rich collection of e-books which are accessible within the campus. These e-books are related to all disciplines of GIK Institute. Apart from this, faculty publications, final year project report and PhD theses are also available online.

10. Software: GIK Institute has access to licensed Microsoft software which come under the Azure Dev Tools for Education program for use of students and faculty. The software suite includes but is not limited to Windows 10 and 11 Pro, Office 365 (Online Office, Teams, OneDrive and other M365 Apps), Visual Studio, Machine Learning Server, Azure DevOps Server, Visio Professional, Project Professional, and SQL Server. Under this program, our faculty and students can also join Microsoft Learning Paths in the fields of software development, databases, AI, data science and others. Additionally, GIK Institute has also established an in-house software cell which develops customized software and web applications in coordination with the faculties and departments to meet their requirements and facilitate them using modern tools.

11. IT Helpdesk: IT Helpdesk provides seamless technical support to the faculty, administrative staff, students, and residents of the campus. The Helpdesk is the central point of contact for the GIK community for their queries and issues pertaining to facilities provided by the IT Department. The IT Helpdesk receives, processes, and responds to service requests during business hours. To facilitate users with IT facilities on a timely basis, the Helpdesk responds to various complaints through an online helpdesk management system. The Helpdesk provides maintenance and repair services related to computing equipment, technical support in online and offline meetings, webinars etc. and photography of official events. The IT Helpdesk, located on the 1st floor of the New Academic Block building, is open 08:00–17:00 to answer queries and provide support through phone, email or in person. The IT Helpdesk can be contacted by dialing 6-2010 from within GIK, or by email at ithelpdesk@giki.edu.pk

IT Staff