Architecting Resilience: A Cloud-Native Neural Risk-Scoring System for Enhanced Campus Security and Streamlined Admissions in Nigerian Universities

Abstract

Nigerian universities face a convergence of pressures that conventional admission procedures were never designed to handle: application volumes that now reach 1.9 million candidates per cycle, growing incidents of campus related violence and organised cultism, and administrative structures whose capacity has not scaled alongside institutional enrolment. The result is a screening process that is simultaneously too slow, too inconsistent, and too shallow to serve its stated purpose of protecting campus communities. This study responds to that gap by designing and specifying the full deployment architecture for a cloud-native system that uses a trained Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to generate quantified pre-admission crime risk scores for individual applicants. The design work reported here builds directly on prior empirical modelling research [3] and extends it across four engineering dimensions: a containerised, cloud-hosted inference infrastructure; a versioned RESTful API layer enabling integration with existing university information systems; a layered data security framework satisfying both the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); and a governance structure that keeps human admissions officers firmly in control of final decisions. A three-phase rollout plan is specified to accommodate the financial and technical realities facing most Nigerian higher education institutions, where capital budgets are constrained and IT departments are thinly staffed. Seven tables provide engineering reference data covering screening performance comparisons, MLP configuration parameters, cloud platform trade-offs, deployment considerations, privacy controls, API specifications, and projected operational indicators. Four architectural figures accompany the text. Taken together, the design presented here offers the Nigerian higher education sector a technically rigorous, institutionally calibrated pathway toward evidence-based, consistent, and legally defensible admission screening — one that does not require institutions to trade away ethical accountability in pursuit of efficiency.