Cloud computing in Education: The answer to budget cuts and centralized content management.

Abstract

Due to declines in staff and budgets, IT personnel and educational institutions are overwhelmed with demands from parents, students, and faculty. In order to meet their demands and provide education services more securely, reliably, and economically, cloud-based computing will become the institutional standard. This pertains to the flexibility and scalability offered by cloud computing together with the use of virtual resources through the internet. This paper evaluates the key advantages of Cloud Computing in educational institutions.

Although, Cloud Computing offers numerous new opportunities and improvement techniques to the educational institutes, there are some concerns that need to be addressed. This study will also discuss the fundamental issues related to cloud computing and their use. Amongst which the major threats identified are security and privacy, political and legal concerns.

There are some available solutions for the major concerns in this area that are assessed in this study. The analysis of these solutions raises the need of priority considerations for educational institutions in reaching out to such technological advancements.

Furthermore, a new solution is proposed and justified for the idea of secure and successful establishment of Cloud Computing in educational institutes, which necessitates the process of a careful decision-making and implementation plan.

This paper gives a thorough analysis of the details of Cloud Computing and the associated parameters that an educational institution must consider before the implementation of such high technology as an answer to budget cuts and content management.

Cloud computing in Education: The answer to budget cuts and centralized content management

Introduction

Education is conceded as the main pillar in society development. Transformation in society prevails by means of collaboration between the universities, government and industries. Due to this reason, educational institutes are facing dramatic increase of costs and decrease in the budget. This requires the employment of new and improved technology to tackle the pressure they face and achieve their purpose (Katz and Goldstein et al., 2010).

The need to improve and optimize the efficiency of the educational institutes, requires enhancement of internal operations. The answer to such needs for the purpose of new technology in IT service is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing provides software, services and other infrastructure on demand through the network. Higher education gains attractive advantages from cloud computing, it reduces information and communication technology (IT) costs by providing a digital experience of the capital assets (Contact North, 2012).

There are certain acronyms to be studied related to cloud computing which help identify the types of cloud services available. Private cloud is solely used for operations for an organization. The community cloud is an infrastructure solution for a community of several organizations who have similar concerns regarding their mission, policy and security requirements. When the information has to be shared to the public or targets a greater number of people, the public cloud infrastructure is used. The cloud is also used as a hybrid service. Communities, or private and public infrastructure with the help of their unique entities can hybridize ...