Cost benefit analysis of cloud computing in education

Abstract

Application of cloud computing in education not only relieves the educational institutions from the burden of handling the complex IT infrastructure management as well as maintenance activities, but also leads to huge cost savings. Along with many industry sectors, education sector would be largely benefited by adopting cloud services. Cloud promises to deliver affordable, reliable and flexible computing solutions to the education sector and enable it to compete more effectively with bigger organisations. The motive of this paper is to analyse the approach that has been followed to identify the benefits and limitations of cloud computing. Specific case of a lab setup has been taken to illustrate the financial aspects. A comparative analysis of cloud-based hosting versus conventional (on-premise) application deployment has also been presented.