An Overview of Cloud Services Adoption Challenges in
Higher Education Institutions
Abdulrahman Alharth
i, Fara Yahya, Robert J. Walters and Gary B. Wills
Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K.
Keywords: Cloud Services Adoption, Challenges, Cloud Computing, Higher Education, Integrated TAM Model.
Abstract: Information Technology (IT) plays an important role in enabling education services be delivered to users.
Most education online services in universities have been run on the cloud to provide services to support
students, lecturers, researchers and administration staff. These are enabled with the emergence of cloud
computing in the world of IT. Cloud computing offers on demand Internet-based computing services. This
paper presents an overview of cloud computing adoption in higher education, mainly tertiary institutions and
universities. The focus of the paper is the challenges of cloud computing in higher education. It introduces
the background to cloud computing and reviews research on adoption challenges in higher education
institutions. These challenges are important as they provide an overview of the adoption of cloud in higher
education. The authors proposed an integrated reference model based on the challenges in the literature
integrated with TAM model to investigate the factors influence the users’ attitudes and behaviours toward
using cloud education services in universities ICT provision.
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the Internet has accelerated the use of
cloud services to support education online system.
The cloud has become the main backbone in enabling
such services by providing facilities to users. Cloud
computing is known as a recent model that enables
users to have computing resources on demand and
pay per use (Sultan, 2010). It has been used widely in
education; educators and students store and share
their data widely in the cloud (Sultan, 2010).
Previously, data were kept in external hard drives or
storage servers in a location having restricted access
in private networks. Nowadays, data can be stored in
the cloud allowing accessibility to data to be more
flexible and efficient.
Previous research has shown many aspects of
cloud computing have been studied in the area of
education, technology, education information
systems (Alshwaier, 2012), integrating education
resources and education system development (Huang,
2012). Smaller educational institutions often lack the
resources or abilities to take full advantage of
information technology. Cloud computing offers
opportunities to improve the quality of education by
offering flexibility and accessibility through the
Internet. This can enable more dynamic and
interactive learning experiences and allow students
and teachers in multiple locations to collaborate and
communicate more effectively (Alabbadi, 2011). In
addition, cloud-based services can offer users and
academic institution cost savings and access to
scalable computing power (Buyya et al., n.d.;
Armbrust et al., 2009; Motta et al., 2012).
2 BACKGROUND
This section presents the backgroud of cloud
computing definitions, models and characteristics.
Cloud computing computing is defined by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) as a model for providing a provisioned and
on-demand computing resources which includes
networks, servers, storage, applications, and services.
It can be accessed using the Internet and needs
minimal management effort or interaction from the
cloud service provider (CSP) (Mell and Grance,
2011). Cloud computing is delivered at levels
offering software applications, application platforms
or various infrastructure elements as cloud systems.
According to NIST (Mell and Grance, 2011), cloud
computing has three service models:
102
Alharthi A., Yahya F., Walters R. and Wills G..
An Overview of Cloud Services Adoption Challenges in Higher Education Institutions.
DOI: 10.5220/0005529701020109
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Emerging Software as a Service and Analytics (ESaaSA-2015), pages 102-109
ISBN: 978-989-758-110-6
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
- Software as a Service (SaaS): the entire system
is cloud based, so users are presented with the
application(s) only.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): suitable for user
intending to deploy their own applications
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): provides
cloud based infrastructure such as storage,
processing and networking elements.
Cloud computing is usually deployed in four models
(Mell and Grance, 2011), Private Cloud, Community
Cloud, Public Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud.
3 CLOUD IN HIGHER
EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS
Higher Education institutions play an important role
in the growth of societies. As with organisations
nowadays, universities have become more reliant on
Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
ICT and internet-based services have to provide their
stakeholders with educational services. Cloud
computing is likely to be an attractive proposition to
start up and small to medium educational
establishments. The potential of cloud computing
may include but is not limited to increasing service
efficiency and cost-savings. An example from the
University of California (UC) at Berkeley, found
cloud computing to be attractive for use in one of their
courses which was focused exclusively on developing
and deploying SaaS applications (Alshwaier, 2012).
The Medical College of Wisconsin Biotechnology
and Bioengineering Centre in Milwaukee found the
use of cloud computing in their research has provided
an astounding computing power. Researchers at the
centre have been doing protein research which has
been made more accessible to scientists from
anywhere in the world. This is due largely to renting
Google’s cloud-based servers (Sultan, 2010).
Some universities have adopted cloud computing
for economic reasons. The Washington State
University’s School of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science (EECS) has suffered cuts in its
budget. However, the EECS claims that despite the
challenging economic climate, cloud computing has
actually enabled it to expand the services it offers to
faculties and students (Sultan, 2010).
Some Universities are facing difficulties to
provide scalable and flexible IT services. For
instance, in traditional computer labs, there are many
challenges present such as, limitation of lab hours and
seats during the peak hours, repairing and
maintaining computer labs, traveling to and from
university, cost of outfitting traditional computer lab
(hardware and software). Normally, IT services
required by students, researchers and academic are
requested from the IT Department, whose job is
illustrated in Figure 1.
The IT department provides students, staff,
academics and developers with different software and
hardware tools. However, in cloud computing all
these arrangements can be migrated to the cloud
(Sultan, 2010). Figure 2 illustrates an example of how
cloud computing is used in the university.
Figure 1: Users of Traditional IT services in a University
(Sultan, 2010).
Figure 2: Cloud computing service models in a University
(Mathew, 2012).
Cloud Computing offers services that enable the
universities to concentrate more on teaching and
research activities rather than building on complex IT
configurations and software systems (Sultan, 2010).
It can also be deployed more quickly. Complexity can
be reduced with Cloud Computing. Students can
exploit different learning tools. Students already use
some, such as Google Docs and Office365 and
Windows Azure Platform for computer science
students (Ercan, 2010). Students can access the
learning resources they need from anywhere and at
any time with any Internet capable device.
Lecturers may experience flexible benefits as the
cloud provides an easier platform to prepare their
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teaching portfolio presentations, lessons,
conferences, articles, etc. Researchers may also
benefit from the advantages of using the latest
technologies and hardware to do their experiments,
while paying for using these services only on demand
(Mircea and Andreescu, 2011).
Developers can design, build and test applications
on the infrastructure of the cloud service provider and
produce those applications from cloud provider data
centres to the end user (Sultan, 2010; Huang, 2012)
System administrators can leverage processing,
storage, database management and other resources
available on the cloud.
4 CLOUD SERVICES IN HIGHER
EDUCATION
The trend of educational cloud computing has been
adopted by many leading IT companies. Microsoft,
Google, Amazon and IBM have provided much
initiative to support education institutions with the
necessary learning tools. Some of these initiatives are
free with no cost. Table 1 shows some of the existing
educational clouds and tools. With the availability of
content online, it is unnecessarily for lecturers to print
teaching materials. Nowadays, students have the
choice to access homework assignments, lesson
notes, and other materials online with the cloud.
Some of the leading cloud services in higher
education are described below.
Microsoft Education Cloud. Microsoft
Education Cloud has been actively developing
educational cloud services such as Microsoft Office
365. It provides schools with free email, website with
editing and storage facility, instant messaging, web
conferencing, and 25 GB of personal storage (Jay,
2014). Furthermore, students and faculty are able to
use any browser to create documents using Microsoft
Office (David, 2013).
The downside to Microsoft 365 is the cost. While
a free option is available (with a signed contract), a
per-user monthly payment is required to access
features such as Office Mobile, Office applications
for PC or Mac, unlimited email storage and
voicemail. More alarming is Microsoft’s inability to
ensure 99.9% uptime without monthly payment (Jay,
2014).
Google Education Cloud. Google Apps for
Education is one of the most used application as it
does not involve actual cost (Jay, 2014). It is free with
no hidden costs. Some of the feature include cloud
email, 30GB of storage, hosting, word processing and
collaboration tools (Google, 2015). Google is
Microsoft’s strongest competitor. If it is compared to
Microsoft’s Office Suite, there is an existing
familiarity with many of Google’s products such as
Gmail, Chat, and Calendar. Nevertheless, the main
drawback is that it requires users to have (or create) a
Google account. It is compulsory for user of age 13
years old and below to get parent consent.
Table 1: Examples of educational cloud-based applications
(Razak, 2009; Alshwaier, 2012).
Commercial
Product Name
Education cloud
apps
Features
Microsoft
Education Cloud
Microsoft
Live@edu
Website Creation
File sharing
Word processing
Desktop sharing
Resource scheduling
Google
Education
Cloud
Google Apps
Education (GAE)
Google Mail
Google Sites
Google Docs
Google Video
Google Calendar
Google Talk
Earth Browser Earth Browser
Provide real
Time data for weather,
geological and other
data
Socratica Socratica
Classrooms in science
to access
Create and study
modules
VMWare Virtual Desktop
Provide Virtual
computers
IBM Cloud
Academy
Virtual computing
lab
Smart analytics system
Earth Browser. Earth Browser is a virtual globe
software developed by Lunar software. It is available
online as a flash application or be installed locally as
an application (EarthBrowser, 2015a). It focuses
mainly on visualising geophysical information such
as weather, earthquakes, etc. It shows the earth as
satellite images. EarthBrowser can be used in real-
time. It is shows the object in three dimensional
model with continuously updates information
(EarthBrowser, 2015b). The representation of the
earth is rendered along with a large data which is said
to be accurate. The object can also be rotated and
zoomed to a given distance.
Socratica. Socratica produces high-quality
educational videos for people of all ages (Socratica,
2015). The videos developed are high-definition,
clear, concise, and beautiful. Socratica collects and
organizes the best free educational videos into topics
that can be used by users. Socratica's mission is to
organise educational videos. This can be used by
users to create optimised learning experience. They
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have also restricted videos suitable for age groups by
having different channels in YouTube.
Virtual Desktops. In computing, a virtual
desktop is known as another user interface that is able
to provide user with the virtual space of a computer's
desktop environment through the use of a software
application installed in a user’s physical computer.
(VMware, 2015). Generally, there are two ways to
expand the virtual area of the screen. The virtual
desktop are switchable allowing user to create virtual
copies of their desktop that is switchable. This can be
done with open windows existing one desktops.
Another approach can expand the size of one
virtual screen more than the physical viewing device.
Usually, navigating an oversized virtual desktop is
viewed using scrolling/panning into the subsection of
the virtual desktop. One of the most popular VMware
product is VMware Horizon 6. It provides a virtual
desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform that provides
virtualized and remote desktops and applications
system through one platform, enabling users access to
their online resources through one integrated
workspace (VMware, 2015).
IBM Cloud Academy. IBM cloud academy is a
collaborative community of leaders in education. It is
intended for educational institutions, with a goal to
help reduce costs and optimise services while making
information available, and secure if needed (IBM,
2014). It can also be used to consolidate resources,
improve student success, and accelerate scientific
discoveries. On the management part, it is expected
to add administrative efficiencies, and conserve
resources.
These are known as how cloud can help
educational institutions to provide services. They are
actively integrating cloud technologies into their
infrastructures to share best practices in the use of
clouds and to collaborate with partners to create
innovative cloud technologies and models (IBM,
2014).
5 CLOUD COMPUTING
ADOPTION CHALLENGES IN
HIGHER EDUCATIONS
Despite the flexibility, scalability, on demand and
powerful recourses cloud computing paradigm offers
the higher education institutions, there is a low rate
adoption of cloud computing in higher education
institutions according to Gartner evaluation. Gartner
mentioned that only 4% is the existing usage of cloud
services in education. Another study highlights that
12% of the participants are not familiar with cloud
computing services whereas 88% of them agree that
cloud computing education services must be
exploited in the schools (Kurelovi, Rako and
Tomljanovi, 2013). However, migration to the cloud
may not be an easy task overnight. The higher
education institutions face several challenges that
hinder adopting cloud computing. Researchers have
highlighted many factors that affect universities’
decisions to adopt cloud computing as shown in Table
2. The challenges are described in the section below.
5.1 Security
Security in cloud computing is a major concern faced
in the adoption of cloud computing, not only in
academic institutions but in all industries. Cloud
providers must maintain confidentiality, integrity and
availability (CIA) by establishing security
requirements to satisfy educational cloud computing
systems. Some of these requirements are
identification and authentication accounts for
students, faculty members and administration staff to
verify and validate each individual by username and
password. Some need control permissions, priorities
and resource ownership (authorisation). Encryption
techniques should be employed to protect sensitive
data of institution such as exams, grades, etc. from
tampering or unauthorized access. There is also need
to ensure non-repudiation is some circumstances
which means the transactions cannot be denied using
time stamps, digital signatures and confirmation
receipts (Razak, 2009; Ketel, 2014; Sultan, 2010;
Mathew, 2012; Alshwaier, 2012).
5.2 Privacy
Privacy in higher education ensures sensitive data are
protected from unauthorised and unauthenticated
access in the cloud. Student’s records, researchers’
intellectual property should be maintained on the
cloud. To protect the privacy of personal data
European Union (EU), has privacy regulations that
prohibit the transmission of some types of personal
data outside the EU. This issue has required
companies such as Amazon and others to provide
offerings of storage facilities located in the EU.
Regulation compliance impedes some higher
education from adopting cloud-computing paradigm
(Razak, 2009; Sultan, 2010; Mathew, 2012).
5.3 Lock-in
Vendor lock–in means that the university or instituti-
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Table 2: Adoption Challenges in Higher Education.
Cloud Computing Adoption Challenges in Higher Education
Authors Security Privacy Lock-in Reliability Bandwidth Management Trust Acceptance
(Abdul Razak, 2009)
(Sultan, 2010)
(Alshwaier, 2012)
(Mathew, 2012)
(Ketel, 2014)
(Shakeabubakar, 2015)

on using cloud services from one provider may find
all data they store and apps they use are locked-in to
the products of specific provider which implies risks
and significant costs to migrate to another vendor or
to revert to on-premises traditional IT systems
(Alshwaier, 2012; Sultan, 2010).
5.4 Reliability
Reliability has also been an issue for cloud users. For
example, in February 2008, Salesforce.com
customers were without service for 6 hours while
Amazon’s S3: simple storage service and EC2
experienced 3 hours outage in the same month a few
days later and 8 hours outage in July. An outage is the
absence of the Cloud service. Outage of the services
in Higher education institutions can disrupt students
from learning and can affect the learning schedule for
the classes. It was mentioned that an 100%
availability is impossible (Mathew, 2012; Sultan,
2010).
5.5 Bandwidth
Internet bandwidth is the backbone of the
internet-based educational services. The quality of
service relies on the connection speed, which can
require investment in the network infrastructure
(Ketel, 2014; Mathew, 2012).
5.6 Management
There are differences between traditional education
management and education management with cloud
computing. Hence, implementing cloud computing
will lead to management challenges such as how to
manage teaching and learning, the content and
courses, the examinations and students (David, 2013;
Ghorab, 1997).
5.7 Trust
Trust of online services is one of the most challenging
factors in academia. In 2013, a research was
conducted in Malaysian Universities
(Shakeabubakor, 2015), which were UKM, UTM,
UM, and UNITEN. The study aim was to investigate
the researchers needs of productivity tools based on
cloud computing in their reserch practices. The
authors conducted interviews with researchers and
postgraduate students. One of the significant findings
was that 89% of the interviewed researchers distrust
cloud application in their research activities
(Shakeabubakor, 2015; Razak, 2009).
5.8 Acceptance
It is not easy to convince the decision makers in
higher education to shift from one pattern to another.
Cloud computing is a new IT Paradigm and it will
change the familiar traditional pattern. Therefore, the
users’ (academics and top management) perception
and acceptance will have an effect on adoption of
cloud computing within institutions (Ketel, 2014).
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Figure 3: A proposed integrated model for cloud computing adoption in higher education institutions.
6 CLOUD COMPUTING
ADOPTION MODEL IN
HIGHER EDUCATION
In this paper, we suggest an investigation towards
challenges aforementioned. Technology Acceptance
Model (TAM) (Davis, 2014) is adopted and
integrated with additional factors in the literature to
investigate further factors that influence the adoption
of cloud computing in higher education institutions.
TAM is the most influential extensions of Ajzen and
Fishbein’s Theory of reasoned action (TRA) (Ajzen
and Madden, 1986). Based on an examination of
computer-usage behaviour, Davis developed the
TAM, which is designed to predict acceptance of
information technologies and use on the job. It has
been widely applied to variety of technologies and
users. Several researchers have replicated TAM
model to provide empirical evidence on the existing
correlation between the usefulness and ease of use
when using new technology. In addition, the
researchers focused on testing the validity and
reliability of the questionnaire instrument used by
Davis and they found that the instrument had
predictive validity for intent to use, self-reported
usage and attitude toward use with different samples
of users and different technologies (Hendrickson et
al., 1993; Albert, 1993; Szajna and Worth, 1994). The
TAM addresses why users accept or reject the use of
information technology due to external variables: in
our model we categorise the external variable and
divide them into two types:
1- Internal Factors: consist of Managers, decision
makers and academic expert’s acceptance and
their cultural and social believes and training
needs to use cloud services in higher education
institutions ‘user’s factors’.
2- External Factors: consist of Security, privacy,
reliability, lock-in and Bandwidth ‘Technological
factors’ that intervene and indirectly affect their
attitude toward using it.
In this theory, the individual’s attitude is based on two
elements; the first one, ‘perceived usefulness (PU)’
which is the measurement of the person’s beliefs
about whether using the cloud services in Higher
education would enhance their job performance.
Perceived usefulness is an important element for
investigating individual acceptance of a new
technology (Ghorab, 1997; Anandarajan et al., 2002).
According to Davies (Davis, 2014), individuals tend
to use an electronic system when they believe that
using the system will help in improving their job. It
was confirmed that perceived usefulness factor has a
strong impact on e-learning success (Park, 2009). So,
in this study the users in universities such as IT staff
and academic are more likely to use cloud education
services if they feel that it is useful in education
purposes.
The second, ‘perceived ease of use (PEOU)’ is the
measurement of the person’s beliefs about using the
cloud services in higher education institutions
without expending extra effort. Perceived ease of use
is defined as the extent to which the academic staff
believe using cloud education emerging services
would be free of effort. Perceived ease of use plays a
key role in investigating individual acceptance of a
new technology. TAM is the most widely applied
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model of user acceptance and usage. When users feel
the technologies can be used in an easy way, it is more
probable that they will adopt cloud services in their
educational practices, so ease of use will affect
universities staff attitude and behaviour. Therefore,
the factor is selected in the model to examine the
users’ acceptance of using cloud services in their
teaching as academic or to store records and leverage
different services such PaaS for developers to design,
implement, test, and run new software.
If the ease of use and usefulness of cloud
computing services in higher education has been
recognised by academics and top management
personnel. This may lead to an increase the adoption
rate of cloud computing in the education sector.
Figure 3 above shows the proposed integrated model
for this context. This will be used as a reference
model in investigating the adoption factors in higher
education institutions.
7 CONCLUSION
Cloud computing in higher education is still in its
infancy compared to other industries. However, over
time it will continually grow. The adoption of cloud
computing may help universities to focus more on
their main goals which are related to teaching and
learning with minimum expenditure. Students and
staff can rapidly and cost-effectively access various
application platforms and pool of resources
on-demand. Cloud computing services are useful and
sometimes necessary to meet challenges and barriers
to providing IT services in Universities.
Important challenges include security, privacy
and vendor lock-in that can affect the adoption of
cloud computing in education but there internal
factors such as user’s acceptance, user’s trust, Internet
efficiency and the educational management roles.
This is an ongoing research of challenges that affects
the adoption of cloud computing in higher education.
Based on previous research, there is a lack of
empirical studies investigating the low adoption of
cloud computing in higher education institutions. Our
future work will focus on investigating success
factors for adoption of cloud computing in higher
education using the proposed integrated reference
model in this paper.
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