This article describes a process for introducing modern technological subjects into the academic curricula of non-technical universities. The process described may increase and contribute to social sustainability by enabling non-technical students’ access to the field of the Internet of Things and the broader Industry 4.0. The process has been defined and tested during a curricular reform project that took place in two large universities in Eastern Europe. In this article, the authors describe the results and impact, over multiple years, of a project financed by the European Union that aimed to introduce the following subjects into the academic curricula of business students: cloud computing, big data, mobile programming, and social networks and cybersecurity (CAMSS). The results are useful for those trying to implement similar curricular reforms, or to companies that need to manage talent pipelines.

The paper presents the construction of a proof-of-concept for a distributed and decentralized e-voting application in an IoT embedded device with the help of blockchain technology. A SoC board was used as an IoT embedded device for testing the PoC. This solution ensures complete voter anonymity and end-to-end security for all entities participating in the electronic voting process. The paper outlines the solution’s two layers. Implementation details are presented for the e-voting application, which was deployed inside of an IoT embedded device. The solution and presented protocols provide two major properties: privacy and verifiability. To ensure privacy, the proposed solution protects the secrecy of each electronic vote. As for implementing verifiability, the solution prevents a corrupt authority from faking in any way the process of counting the votes. Both properties are achieved in the presented solution e-VoteD-App.

The paper analyses the economic impact of implementing cloud computing technology and computer clusters to provide educational services. Our study conducts a SWOT analysis on a real scenario in which a standard university IT infrastructure is moved into cloud. The paper describes the impact of this new technology on current and future educational services and proposes an architecture that maximizes the benefits for the institution and for students

This article analyzes and highlights the security perspective of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices and their communication challenges, as IoT is considered one of the key emerging fields in Industry 4.0. The IoT architectures can consist of physical systems, virtual ones or even hybrids, combining a collection of different physically active things, sensors, cloud services, specific IoT protocols, communication layers, users and developers. On top of all, it is the business layer, because the scope of the entire IoT environment is to deliver data, to monitor and to facilitate the management of complex processes. In order to facilitate the data exchange between the IoT layers, there have been developed a series of protocols particular to the IoT domain. As in many IT related fields, the solutions are not perfect from the data security and privacy perspectives, many challenges being still open research issues. As the two concepts of IoT and Cloud of Things are connected, bringing real world data into the Cloud to process it, raises Cloud Computing security concerns regarding the privacy and security of data. Although in recent years, many efforts have been made to improve Cloud Computing security, there are risks that need to be taken into consideration. From the Web of Data’s point of view, things are even more prone to security risks. Because privacy is one of the fundamental right of digital users, it is extremely important for new technologies to comply with privacy regulations and policies, such as the new European data protection and privacy frameworks. In this context, companies must take into account standards, challenges and new trends in IoT. In the absence of specific measures, raw or processed data can be easily stolen from the Web of Data. In this paper we analyze and present the main protocols of communication in the IoT field from a data security perspective. Also, we do a review of the main architectures that can improve the security of the communication between IoT devices and the Cloud data storage.