Case Study: Cloud computing model for Indian Higher Education

4.6 Case Study: Cloud computing model for Indian Higher Education

The cloud computing is growing at a very fast rate across the world and HE institutions in India is also experiencing the changes due to a very high adoption rate. The government can easily see that with the adoption of cloud technology they can save a large amount of money and manage all the operations of the HE institutions that are spread across the country in an effective manner. The Maharashtra government in India, is planning to implement an e-government solution to coordinate between various e-government offices and HE institutions and this is only possible with the implementation of the cloud delivery platform. There are large cloud vendors who are taking keen interest in working with Indian HE institutions by designing and implementing educational programs specially designed for delivering

interactive lessons (Sakr, 2014). Vendors such as Microsoft have introduced programs such as Live@edu, whereas Google Apps provides an educational platform to learn and share resources in an interactive manner. The Google Docs has introduced a large suite in the Indian HE institutions by offering Google Docs that allow students and staff to share and compile documents online. The package also provides lot of other features for students and staff working at the HE institution by providing email service, assistance to manage the classrooms and shared storage area and web development tools. The IBM introduced Cloud Academy in the Indian HE institutions that is allowing students to learn in an interactive manner. The use of cloud technology in the Indian HE institutions is allowing all educational institutions to coordinate with each other to improve the learning experience and share resources (Sujit, 2016).

134 | P a g e 4.6.1 List of Benefits and Opportunities

The benefits of implementation of cloud computing technology in the Indian HE institutions are as follows:

 India being a very large country with HE institutions spread across the country. The need to improve these HE institutions can only be possible with the implementation of cloud computing technology. The HE institutions in the country has adapted to the new changes in the educational sector by providing online resources using cloud computing technology as a platform. The use of cloud technology has enabled far better processing ability, provides guarantee with exceptional high up-time,

processing ability and supporting large amount of students and staff to interact with each other regardless of their location to contribute in the latest research and

development in the HE institution (Sakr, 2014);

 With the use of Cloud computing technology the government can easily monitor and manage all HE institutions across the country that was not possible without a

centralized management system;

 Due to the adoption of cloud technology the Indian HE institutions were able to reduce the infrastructure cost and operational cost by moving towards a centralized management framework. The HE institutions were able to experience very fast

processing and high bandwidth speeds that enable the latest research and development and ensure a rich learning environment for students across the educational institution in the country. The cloud computing platform provided the educational institutions to process large quantity of data sets that was not possible with the traditional platforms (Alabbadi, 2016);

 The use of cloud computing in the HE institutions can provide educational network that can be shared by all students across the country. This will provide an opportunity to produce knowledgeable individuals who can contribute to the economy effectively;

 The implementation of HE cloud across all the universities in the country provides equal resources, material and streamline the processes. By implementing the same procedures and processes it will ensure the same standards across all the HE

institutions in the country regardless of their location. This will improve the standard of teaching, learning and research across the country;

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 The use of educational cloud has reduced the cost of licensing new software. Using the traditional model a large amount of budget was spent in acquiring various licenses (Saleh and Shahzad, 2016). By using the educational cloud in HE institutions the cost of licensing is not required. The library and research activities can built e-learning portals which can allow sharing of all resources and applications without the cost of acquiring individual licenses for each university which can save a large amount of money that can be used in research or improving front line services and facilities for students.

4.6.2 List of Challenges and Problems

The list of challenges and problems to deal with, are the following:

 The Indian HE institutions who have adopted to the cloud technology share one of the major concerns regarding the lack of uniform standards or nonexistence of minimum benchmark for level of services across the industry to provide an effective, uniform and reliable service to the cloud users. This is creating a major barrier in the adoption of the cloud services due to lack of uniform standards and the level of services offered (Kalpeyeva and Mustafina, 2016):

 India is a third world country and it is still progressing and making socio economic development. The major hurdle that is faced in the implementation and the use of cloud computing is the variable standards, speed and connectivity issues related to Internet across the country. Just like any other third world country; India is facing the same problem of different Internet connection speeds across the country. In India the standards for Internet speed is not consistent between the major cities and other rural areas. Some universities due to their location cannot be connected to the cloud or the speed of the Internet is a major barrier to take full advantage of the cloud computing.

In order to take full advantage of the cloud computing all HE institutions regardless of their location should be able to access high speed Internet access. With only

consistent high-speed Internet access the HE institutions will be able to take full advantage of cloud technology by storing and accessing data quickly.

136 | P a g e 4.6.3 Case Study Contribution to the Proposed Model: Higher Education and Adoption of Technology Challenges and Changing Scenario Model

The Indian HE institutions is facing the same external and internal factors mentioned in the proposed model as detailed above, as discussed for Higher Education and Adoption of Technology Challenges and Changing Scenario Model. In the following section different factors from the proposed model that have affected the Indian HE institution will be discussed in detail.

 Service Provider Standards and Level of Service Factors: The next factor that has influence the adoption of cloud technology in the HE institution of India is the level of services or the quality of service offered by the cloud provider in country. There were serious concerns raised by all the stakeholder in the HE institutions due to lack of uniform standards, nonexistence of (QoS) Quality of Service offered by the cloud provider and of absence of minimum benchmark for level of services across the industry to provide an effective, uniform and reliable service to all the cloud users (Bilal et al, 2017). Due to lack of Quality of Service framework and providers offering different standard of service across different cities it is a major barrier in the adoption of cloud computing service for HE institutions that are located in under developed cities in India according to the author. As the cloud computing is gaining popularity; the HE institution in India are having problems to adopt the service due to lack of minimum service level framework or poor and variable QoS (Quality of Service) offered by the cloud providers in the country. The standard of service which can act as a benchmark in the selection of the cloud provider and provide quality of services according to the users expectations is not available among the cloud providers. Due to this there is poor level of standards offered by different cloud providers that is resulting in security and data privacy breaches, authentication and authorization problems, lack of third party audit and identity management issues, integrity and variable availability standards, confidentiality and no uniform incident response and monitoring standards (Kumar and Hsiang, 2017).

 Government policies and Economic Factor: The India government can easily see that with the adoption of cloud technology they can save a large amount of money and manage all the operations of the HE institutions that are spread across the country in an effective manner. The government policies and economic factor needs a detailed consideration in the adoption of cloud computing technology for HE institution in

137 | P a g e India (Manvi and Shyam, 2015). The government is planning to implement an e-government solution to coordinate between various e-government offices and HE institutions and this is only possible with the implementation of the cloud delivery platform. There are large cloud vendors who are taking keen interest in working with Indian HE institutions by designing and implementing educational programs specially designed for delivering interactive lessons. The government can save a large amount of capital investment and reduced the operating cost by moving towards the cloud computing platform. With the integration of technology and especially cloud computing technology into education the whole sector has been reformed where the initial capital investment required to have and maintained expensive hardware and software is removed.

 Technological Factors: The move towards cloud technology there will be no need to acquire new infrastructure and all IT maintenance will be carried out by the third party provider which will result in saving a large amount of capital and time. The technology will ensure monitoring the performance of all HE institutions from a central location (Bayya, 2009). There was a requirement from various sectors of the population to reduce the electricity consumption and move toward green computing.

The move towards cloud technology by the HE institutions in India will help efficient use of key resources and promoted energy saving mechanism. With improve resource utilization and saving energy consumption there are various technological challenges in the adoption of cloud technology such as resource exhaustion, lack of standard of services, not predictable level of performance, issues such as data transfer bottleneck and data lock-in uses that need to be addressed (Hussain and Abdulsalam, 2014).

 Competitor Influence Factor: Similar to any other HE institutions across the world the India HE institutions are facing enormous pressures from their competitors in the education sector to provide quality of teaching and learning facilities. The demand on HE institutions is to support latest research such as processing big data for producing new medicines or any other latest development in the field of science and technology, improve teaching and learning facilities by providing more interaction and support the preferred learning styles of the students who want to access any information on the move and remain connected regardless of their location. (Hussain and Abdulsalam, 2014). These new trends can only be supported by the use of cloud computing technology platform that can provide a rich learning environment for the researchers,

138 | P a g e students and staff at HE institutions in the country. All HE institutions in India are trying to provide these facilities to their students and there is a huge competition in the education sector that is influencing the move towards the cloud computing technology.