Cloud Computing for Higher Education Institutes: Architecture, Strategy and Recommendations for Effective Adaptation

Due to the prevailing financial crisis and the growing needs, higher education (HE) institutes are facing challenges in providing necessary IT support for educational, research and development activities. Cloud Computing (CC) environment can rescue HE institutes from the above mentioned challenges The HE institute must exploit the opportunities afforded by CC while minimizing the associated security risks to allow access to advanced IT infrastructure, data centers, and applications and protect sensitive information. In this paper, CC architecture for HE institute containing the various deployment models, Service Models and user domain is proposed. For smoothing the migration from traditional system to CC based system a five phase strategy is presented. We finally provide the recommendations for a successful and efficient migration from traditional to cloud based system.