Abstract
The new cloud computing technology is very much in the business and economic horizon, extending its horizons to non-business sectors like education. This study is a study of the need and applicability of the fast spreading business enterprises’ external cloud computing technology, to the higher educational institution in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the educational hub of the MENA region, in terms of three premier higher educational institutions—Zayed University (ZU), Higher College of Technology (HCT), and the UAE University (UAEU) for their collaboration services for better educational services. Employing the interview method to a sample of administrators, it was found that the institutions were lacking in cloud computing (CC) resulting in delays in student services, such as inter-university transfers of students. The administrators, however, were convinced of CC technology for inter-institutional collaboration. For this, it is suggested to establish a platform of cloud computing services, with required staff training and motivation for efficient and collaboration functioning of the HEIs in the UAE, which is evolving into a global educational center. As this is not the end of the problem, there is a need for further research in the problem, such as staff exchange, and research cooperation as it is a modest but worthwhile contribution to the educational dimension of cloud computing for educational efficiency.
Highlights
The overall conclusion of the study is that the IHEs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are not presently cloud computing connected, but they would like to have this new computing system for inter-university connectivity and better student services, especially in migration from one university/college to another university/college, with care
1) For services and service organization(s), Platform as a service (PaaS) should be a good cloud computing option, as in the case of the three institutions because of: a) The flexibility of this model to be customized. b) Developers will take the responsibility of managing and modifying, testing and deploying the application based on the institutions requirements in a much quicker, simpler and cost-effective way. c) A third party takes the responsibility to manage and virtualize servers, storage, networking and Platform as a Service (PaaS) software itself. d) It can be used as a hybrid model when there is a need for either public or private cloud in case of future expansion
Scalability of the hardware will be based on the requirements coming from the three institutions based on their needs and growth
Summary
Efficiency, flexibility, agility, cost, capacity and profitability are of the concerns. Putting data ‘in the cloud’ essentially means paying someone else to manage it, and connecting to their servers via the internet to access your data when you need it. “Cloud computing” has been defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology of (NIST) as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” [4]. In this form, which is being built on top of virtualized infrastructure, the operating system and its related services “the platform” is delivered by the company to the user over the internet. Many organizations might share the same infrastructure hosted by the cloud provider
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