Migration of Cloud Services and Deliveries to Higher Education

Raed Alsufyani, Fash Safdari

and Victor Chang

School of Computing, Creative Technologies and Engineering, Leeds Beckett University, Headingley, Leeds LS6 3QR, U.K.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing Business Framework, Quality of Service, Quality of Experience.

Abstract: This paper discusses the adoption of cloud computing in education. It emphasizes the view that cloud

computing is vital in the education sector because of its ability to reduce the overall costs of IT

infrastructure installation and maintenance, improvement of efficiency, and the sharing of IT resources

among students. The flexibility of cloud computing and its reliability makes it more appropriate for use in

the educational environment. The Leeds Beckett University cloud project utilizes the SAS Educational

Value-Added Assessment System, which gives lecturers the opportunity to deliver accurate content to

students while monitoring their progress. Contemporary educational institutions must look forward to

improve their research and education through cloud computing.

1 INTRODUCTION

The emergence of cloud computing and its

application to diverse fields such as education has

brought about a lot of opportunities for improving

efficiency of service provision (Sultan, 2010). The

key categories of cloud computing that institutions

could adopt include the public cloud, the private

cloud, the hybrid cloud, and the community cloud.

Educational institutions, including colleges and

universities have been quick to adopt cloud

computing to boost efficiency, minimize IT costs,

and improve their research and academic processes.

For instance, Kurelović et al., (2013) estimates that

cloud computing in K-12 students could consume up

to 35% of the IT budget in the coming few years.

This is an indication of the expanding cloud

computing services in education. Ercan (2010)

agrees that the security, reliability, and economic

nature of cloud computing play a vital role in the

challenging environment of education where large

volumes of data are stored. There are a few

frameworks and amongst them, the Cloud

Computing Business Framework (CCBF) (Chang et

al., 2013a) has been regarded as a recommended

cloud adoption framework because of its ability to

classify business models, portability, organizational

sustainability, and the linkage of service models.

The SAS Educational Value-Added Assessment

System stands out as one of the best for the

educational sector, as evidenced from its use at

Leeds Beckett University.

This paper explicates cloud computing to

highlight its meaning, classifications, reasons for

university adoption, frameworks for cloud

computing, and the factors for deploying cloud

computing in education.

1.1 Defining Cloud Computing

There is no standard definition of cloud computing

as many IT professionals have come up with their

own definitions. However, the commonly used

definition indicates that cloud computing is a cluster

of distributed computers that offer on-demand

resources and services over a networked medium

commonly the internet (Sultan, 2010). It is worth

understanding that it entails the deployment of

groups of remote servers and software networks,

which allow the centralized storage of data and

access to computer services through the internet

(Mokhtar et al., 2013).

1.2 Classification of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is clearly classified into four

significant categories. The first category is the

public cloud. According to Chang et al., (2013), this

is where the entire computing infrastructure is

located in the cloud provider’s premises and the user

has no physical control over it. A public cloud tends

to use shared resources and might be vulnerable to

Alsufyani R., Safdari F. and Chang V..

Migration of Cloud Services and Deliveries to Higher Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0005528500860094

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Emerging Software as a Service and Analytics (ESaaSA-2015), pages 86-94

ISBN: 978-989-758-110-6

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

attacks.

The private cloud comes in as the second

category. This entails one particular organization

using the cloud infrastructure for its different

operations. It is remotely located and is not shared

with other organizations. The advantage of the

private cloud is that the customer has control over

the infrastructure, as it could be hosted internally or

externally (Chen et al., 2014).

The third category is the hybrid cloud, which

implies utilizing both the private and the public

cloud depending on the purposes they serve. For

instance, an organization could use the public cloud

in activities such as customer interaction while

securing its network using the private cloud.

The last significant category is the community

cloud that entails the sharing of infrastructure

between organizations with shared data, and other

data management concerns. The advantage is that it

could be hosted internally or externally depending

on the institution’s choice (Singhal et al., 2013).

This would be the most relevant cloud for the

academic community because it significantly

minimizes costs through a cost-sharing approach.

The operational costs are significantly reduced

because the cloud is shared across community

members. The aspect of cost minimization is also

seen in terms of augmenting existing data

resources rather than building new internal

environments (Youssef, 2012). Moreover, it

makes it easier for educational institutions to

administer cloud and the traditional data centre

environments remotely hence cutting down

overall costs of operation. Again, it allows for

control of the infrastructure by the institutions

utilizing it (Chang et al., 2013a). Internal control of

the cloud facilitates real-time reporting and

ordering through customizable management

portal. Thirdly, the community cloud is relevant

to educational institutions because of their

effective security, privacy, and compliance. It is

usually tailored in such a way that it can address

unique security problems and regulatory needs

relating to the institution (Singhal et al., 2013).

In line with these categories of clouds,

institutions could enjoy various service models. The

first is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Almorsy et al., (2011) affirm that this category

offers relevant products such as remote delivery

through the internet of the entire computer

infrastructure. For instance, it offers storage, virtual

computers, and servers.

The second category is the Platform as a Service

(PaaS). Jula et al., (2014) indicates that this service

model has transformed the traditional delivery of

computing services. For instance, the presence of

this category has enabled cloud providers to

remotely offer diverse products including the

hardware, middleware, a database and the operating

system (Singhal et al., 2013).

Figure 1: Classification of Cloud Computing.

The third model is Software as a Service (SaaS).

This category delivers applications through the

medium of the internet as a service. Users do not

need to install and maintain software, as they have

the pleasure of accessing it through the internet

(Youssef, 2012). Overall, SaaS offers a complete

application functionality stretching from

productivity applications to other programs such as

the Customer Relationship Management.

Figure 2: The Cloud-Computing-Architecture specified by

the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

knows three models, namely Infrastructure (IaaS),

Platform- (PaaS) and Application models (SaaS).

1.3 Challenges of Cloud Computing

Whilst there are potential benefits associated with

public cloud computing implementation, there are

also risks and uncertainties that come with public

cloud computing. Moving computing resources to

the cloud is not without difficulties and issues. For

example, Amazon cloud services outages caused

many organizations the loss of their computing

resources, services and incurred economical losses

MigrationofCloudServicesandDeliveriestoHigherEducation

(Bright, 2011). The potential benefits of cloud

computing need to be assessed against possible

associated risks.

Geczy et al., (2013) stated performance as one of

concerns associated with cloud computing. In cloud

computing, computing services and resources which

were typically installed, managed, and accessed

within organizations premises are hosted in data

centres and in the majority of cases are accessed

over the Internet. Internet is a best-effort and shared

communication infrastructure. The organization data

traffic has to travel through many different routes

and hops shared by other organizations and user

traffic, packets could travel over different routes

which could be saturated and arrived out of

sequence, packets could be lost (Ukil et al., 2013).

These could lead to delay and jitter resulting in

poor performance. Reliability of Internet also plays a

major role in the reliability and availability of the

public cloud services. The internet is an

unpredictable network environment (Ivanus and

Iovan, 2014). These inherent characteristics of

internet could have a major impact on the

performance of public cloud. This paper aims at

surveying the applicability of cloud technology in

education. It is focused on encouraging all

educational institutions to embrace cloud technology

because of its advantages.

2 REASONS FOR UNIVERSITY

CLOUD ADOPTION

Many universities around the globe have moved

swiftly to incorporate cloud computing into their

learning and research processes. Specifically, Chang

and Wills (2013) inform that cloud computing is

viewed as an attractive part of research and

education within universities because of its ability to

allow searches and collaborative working among

students. As previously discussed in section 1.2,

the community cloud is the most relevant for

universities because of its efficiency and cost

reduction, security and privacy, and the agility in

Chang and Wills, 2013). The University of

Greenwich is one of the key institutions that have

adopted cloud computing into their research and

learning processes. In tandem with the University of

Greenwich case study, five significant reasons have

motivated universities to adopt cloud computing.

The first key reason for university cloud

adoption is the fact that it plays an instrumental role

in the reduction of environmental and financial costs

in areas where services are needed for shorter

periods (Chang et al., 2013a). This is bound to save

many universities money, hence avoiding

unnecessary wastage. Every university looks

forward to cut down its operating costs in respect to

IT and energy usage at the institution.

Secondly, many universities are adopting cloud

computing because it has the capacity to make

experiments more repeatable. Ercan (2010) points

out with cloud computing in place, write-ups of

science experiments conducted in the cloud could

contain relevant applications such as the virtual

machine that make them easy to replicate (Ukil et

al., 2013).

Thirdly, Cloud adoption in universities is

motivated by the understanding that it facilitates the

sharing of the workload in cases where the

university is working with another organization

(Avram, 2014).

Another reason for cloud adoption in universities

is that it allows and simplifies the access to web

applications, data centres, and service from any

given location within the university. Chen et al.,

(2014) agrees that this makes it easier for students to

engage in research without having to concentrate in

a particular area.

Lastly, universities are swiftly adopting cloud

computing because of its flexibility and the aspect of

pay as you go. There is always room to use

specialized web-based software that otherwise could

not be supported by in-house policies. This enhances

the level of flexibility because of reduced

bureaucracies among researchers (Ivanus and Iovan,

2014).

Apart from these motivations, the most

significant challenge affecting cloud computing

adoption and implementation is the lack of

standards. Many institutions have found it

difficult to define the desired standards. There

have been no concerted efforts toward the

definition of desirable standards relating to

technological, management, and regulatory

standards related to cloud computing (Avram,

2014). This poses the risk of failure in terms of

take off and subsequent utilization of cloud

computing in school settings.

3 FRAMEWORKS OF CLOUD

COMPUTING

One of the most effective and efficient framework

that different academic institutions could adopt is the

Cloud Computing Business Framework (CCBF).

ESaaSA2015-WorkshoponEmergingSoftwareasaServiceandAnalytics

The Cloud Computing Business Framework would

be appropriate for the academic community because

it plays an instrumental role in promoting a good

cloud design hence ensuring it works efficiently

within the institution through the choice of a

better pattern (Chang et al., 2013a). It also

promotes deployment where all activities in the

software system are assured through interrelated

activities. The migration to the cloud and service

models are also clearly assured through the

CCBF framework (Chang et al., 2013a).

Specifically, the CCBF has four key areas that make

it relevant to the academic community.

The first area is classification. This entails the

categorization of diverse business models to offer

cloud-adopting organizations relevant strategies and

business cases. For instance, the educational

community would be allocated its own strategy

depending on its courses and other services

(Viswanath et al., 2012).

The second relevant area that makes it

appropriate is organizational sustainability.

According to Vakil et al., (2013), it entails a

structured framework that reviews the performance

of the institution accurately. Every educational

institution would want to operate at the best and

most accurate level with the CCBF framework.

The fourth area that makes it relevant to the

academic community is portability. Chang et al.,

(2013a) points out that they would be in a better

position to manage the portability of applications to

the cloud. With such portability, the academic

community would also be in a better position to

transfer applications between clouds offered by

different vendors.

Lastly, the CCBF is appropriate for academic

institutions because of its ability to link various

cloud search approaches and service models such as

the IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and the Business Models

(Borgman et al., 2013). Overall, CCBF is justifiable

for use in the academic community because of its

simulations and ability to address every area.

Apart from this framework, the High

Performance Computing (HPC) Framework

could also be relevant for educational institutions.

Its high computing capabilities and the ability to

facilitate research among students puts it at a

strategic position in terms of applicability to

educational institutions. Again, it gives students

the opportunity to access a shared pool of

configurable computing resources including

servers, networks, storage, and applications.

4 CLOUD IN EDUCATION:

LITERATURE REVIEW

Wu (2010) points out that the adoption of the cloud

into the field of education has been massive, as

many educational institutions have taken the

opportunity to maximize on its many advantages.

The high level of cloud incorporation into the

educational field emanates from its potential to

improve efficiency, costs, and to improve

convenience in the educational sector. Vakil et al.,

(2013) reiterates that numerous educational and

official establishments in the U.S have continued to

recognize the potential of cloud computing in terms

of cost reduction and efficiency. The specific

reasons that have motivated many educational

institutions to adopt cloud computing include:

 The minimization of costs used in the IT

infrastructure

 Attainment of efficiency in education delivery

 Improvement of convenience through features

such as Pay-per-use

 Enhancement of resource consolidation

 Attainment of green IT

 In light of the above reasons, many universities

have gone ahead to adopt cloud computing. For

instance, the University of California at Berkley

found out the significance of cloud computing in

one of their courses that was solely focused on

the development and deployment of SaaS

applications (Fox, 2009). Donations from the

Amazon Web Services (AWS) played an

assistive role in helping the university move the

course from a locally owned infrastructure to the

cloud. It was noted that this would have enabled

it acquires a large number of servers within the

shortest time possible. This was also an

opportunity to enhance resource consolidation at

the university.

Economic reasons have pushed some educational

institutions to adopt and utilize cloud computing in

their learning environments. As noted earlier, cloud

computing reduces costs significantly because it

eliminates costs related to the development and

maintenance of massive IT infrastructure (Jang,

2014).

 In line with economic conditions and the need to

minimize costs, institutions such as the

Washington State University’s School of

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

(EECS) have been forced to embrace cloud

computing to cut down their operational costs.

MigrationofCloudServicesandDeliveriestoHigherEducation

They were able to select the vSphere4 platform,

which is flexible, dynamic, reliable, and offers

seamless maintenance of the IT infrastructure

(Fox, 2009). Learning and research has been

simplified through the cost rationalization

approach, which recognizes the need to do more

with less.

Cloud computing in education has been applied

internationally in numerous educational

institutions starting from primary schools to

universities. Schools in European countries such

as Britain have adopted the cloud in their

educational system hence enhancing efficiency.

 Hicks (2009) affirms that some of the common

examples of U.K universities that have been able

to incorporate cloud computing into their

academia include the Leeds Metropolitan

University and the University of Westminster.

The key factors for the move to the cloud was

cost reduction and the enhancement of reliability

in the use of computing services (Shin et al.,

2014). They have also based three reasons on the

need to enhance green IT in their learning

environment. This has led to proper functioning

and flexible operations in terms of research and

academics.

African educational institutions have not been

left behind in terms of using the cloud in their

research and learning. The lack of an adequate IT

infrastructure and the inability to cope with

software and hardware upgrades have

contributed to the adoption of the cloud in many

African educational establishments (Truong et

al., 2012).

 With the help of Google, institutions such as the

University of Nairobi in Kenya and the National

University of Rwanda have embraced cloud

computing. This has enhanced information

sharing among students and has been critical to

the minimization of costs related to IT

maintenance, enhancement of flexibility, and

resource consolidation. Microsoft is also helping

Ethiopia roll out the project of distributing

250,000 laptops all operating on Microsoft’s

Azure Cloud platform (Sultan, 2010).

Therefore, the critical benefits of using cloud

computing in education could be summarized as

below.

1. Lower capital costs for institutions. Erkoç and

Kert (2012) reiterate that this is especially

because educational institutions have the

opportunity to offer a wide variety of services

while only paying for the actual capacity paid

2. It leads to flexibility in the provision of research

and academic services because users can access

it at any given location in the institution (Fox,

2009).

3. It saves on costs by over 50% related to the

installation and maintenance of IT infrastructure

in academic institutions

4. It offers an optimized and customizable IT

infrastructure, which offers quick accesses to the

desired computing services in the educational

institution (Almorsy et al., 2011)

Figure 3: Deploying Cloud Computing in Education:

benefits & common risks.

However, there are several risks associated with

the use of cloud computing in the academic

community. Common risks of using cloud

computing in education include:

 The cloud is always subject to the risk of virtual

exploits that target both the virtual host and its

users. According to Almorsy et al. (2011), the

common risks that could be suffered include

guest-guest, guest-host, and host-guest virtual

threats.

There is always the threat to data privacy and

security. The interaction between the cloud provider

and the institution poses a major risk to data

security, especially if the matter has not been

critically analyzed (Ercan, 2010).

5 CLOUD COMPUTING FOR

EDUCATION: DEPLOYMENT

SCENARIO

This section presents Cloud Computing for

Education. Several factors need to be keenly

considered before migration of cloud computing

services for education. Katz et al., (2010) reveals

ESaaSA2015-WorkshoponEmergingSoftwareasaServiceandAnalytics

that one of the relevant factors for deployment is

where the cloud services are to be hosted. The

educational institution could choose either the public

or private development approach depending on the

availability of financial resources to host the cloud

within its premises.

The second deployment factor is security.

Educational institutions must figure out the kind of

data that would be put into the cloud

(Lakshminarayanan et al., 2012). Sensitive

information such as the institution’s financial

information would require a higher level of security.

Therefore, they must weigh up the security of the

system before deployment.

The third factor for deploying cloud computing

in education is customization capabilities. Different

educational institutions have different approaches to

the learning processes (Mircea and Andreescu,

2011). Others would want to customize their

services and products to students. Therefore, it is

vital to understand whether the available cloud

computing services are customizable to meet local

needs.

Figure 4: Factors for Deploying Cloud Computing in

Education.

According to Powell (2010), the fourth factor is

the legal requirements relating to the cloud.

Educational institutions need to have an in depth

understanding of the legal considerations and

implications that might arise from security breaches

in the cloud.

5.1 Quality of Service (QoS) and

Quality of Experience (QoE) for

Leeds Beckett SAS Cloud

The quality of service (QoS) is primarily used in

monitoring the performance of the cloud service

without necessarily reflecting the user’s quality of

experience. However, the quality of experience

(QoE) makes up for this by considering the views of

the person using cloud services for their activities

(Safdari and Chang, 2014). In the educational sector,

the improvement of cloud services could be realized

through the quality of experience monitoring

approach. This is especially because it tends to

focus on the entire service experience and it tends

to offer a holistic evaluation of the system rather

than focusing on narrowed experiences of users

(Safdari and Chang, 2014). The Leeds Beckett

University cloud project is anchored on the ability of

combining the cloud with big data techniques. For

instance, the cloud project looks forward to the

facilitation of matters such as Storage as a Service,

Education as a Service, Business Intelligence as a

Service, and Integration as a Service (Amrein-

Beardsley and Collins, 2012). The Leeds Beckett

University cloud project utilizes the SAS

Educational Value-Added Assessment System (SAS

EVAAS), which has been perceived as the most

robust and reliable system available (Amrein-

Beardsley and Collins, 2012). Accordingly, it uses

SAS for several reasons. Firstly, SAS EVAAS helps

lecturers at the university to measure the progress of

students and accurately improve the delivery of their

instruction. They are always able to modify the

curriculum depending on the ability of their students

to grasp the content being taught in class (Amrein-

Beardsley and Collins, 2012). Additionally, it assists

in the alignment of professional goals with the

greatest needs of students and hence improving the

ability of educators to deliver content. It basically

helps in the evaluation of the effectiveness of

educators in delivering their content to students.

Secondly, policy makers at the university are able to

conduct more rigorous longitudinal analysis of the

student test results at the university with SAS

EVAAS (Amrein-Beardsley and Collins, 2012). This

is attained through the assessment of the

accessibility of students to opportunities and

services offered through the cloud. The educational

environment would be more efficient with the use of

the SAS in their cloud computing system because of

the enhancement of teaching strategies and student

success.

6 A CASE STUDY AT LEEDS

BECKETT UNIVERSITY

Since a number of universities do not publish their

their Educational Cloud projects publicly, there is a

need to disseminate lessons learned and

recommendations in the Higher Education. This

section presents a case study for Leeds Beckett

University’s case study of our Cloud project,

MigrationofCloudServicesandDeliveriestoHigherEducation

including the current status, technologies and useful

lessons learned.

6.1 Illustration of Leeds Beckett SAS

Cloud

SAS Cloud has been used as a platform and

language for business intelligence (BI) at Leeds

Beckett University since Year 2012. The aim is to

improve the quality of education and students’

experience through the interactive platform provided

by SAS. The objective is to develop a master’s

program in Business Intelligence, which includes

modules such as “Business Intelligence, Data

Analysis and Visualization” (BIDAV), “Data

Warehouse”, “Advanced Data Warehouse” and

elective modules. Amongst all these modules,

BIDAV is the one that provides students both

theoretical foundations and practical learning

experience, in which students have to learn the SAS

programming and use it for developing BI code. BI

is a popular topic, in which Chang (2014) has

demonstrated how to design, implement and analyze

a Business Intelligence in the Cloud to calculate risk

and return for financial stock options. The ability to

process, interpret and utilize data, as well as

understand complex data analysis, is an important

skill for employability. Similarly BI concepts can be

fully transferable to Higher Education to ensure that

students can equip with numeracy, quantitative and

analytical skills required by employers. With more

training in place, students can build up their

competency and demonstrate their BI portfolios and

services. They can import their datasets directly into

SAS, which have built-in libraries and server

connected directly to the Cloud in the US. Upon

clicking “run”, their code will be executed directly

on the SAS Cloud in the US as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: A screenshot about SAS Cloud.

Students can receive all their data analysis

results, interpretation and visualization in one go

with less than 10 seconds of waiting time. Table 1

shows an example for SAS syntax. SAS is a

procedure-driven language, meaning that all the

steps have been predefined. The emphasis is to show

a list of useful procedures to students and explain

how they can be used in different cases. In Table 1,

“autoreg” is a procedure to perform regression

which can generate statistical tests and data analysis

simultaneously. All these take a matter of seconds

for students. The data used for analysis is called

“pred”, which uses autoreg for computation and then

calculates the residual (the sum of all the differences

between all datapoints and regression line) from the

statistical.

6.2 Data Visualization

Data Visualization is an important aspect in learning

business intelligence, in which students can directly

understand the interpretations of data and its

correlations with other aspects of data analysis.

Since there are several statistical results and tests, it

is difficult for some students to understand the

meanings of all these outputs (Chang, 2014). Hence,

the use of data visualization is extremely useful for

students to understand complex datasets and their

correlations to other data.

Figure 6: An example of data visualization with statistical

tests and key outputs.

According to our experience, students can

understand the module, BIDAV, much quicker than

using traditional means of learning. In order to

understand the benefits and long-term implications,

ESaaSA2015-WorkshoponEmergingSoftwareasaServiceandAnalytics

questionnaires will be designed to identify the

improvement in learning efficiency and student

satisfaction in our next phase of research. Figure 6

shows the screenshot of a data visualization output,

where all the key results can be computed

simultaneously along with different types of

statistical tests.

6.3 Discussion

Overall, it is clear that cloud computing is directly

applicable to the educational sector because of the

significant role it plays in boosting learning and

research processes among students. The community

cloud is the most recommendable because of its

ability to consider the costs dedicated to IT

infrastructure within learning institutions. The

sharing of resources plays an instrumental role in

ensuring that costs are minimized in the best ways

possible (Lakshminarayanan et al., 2012). The

adoption of cloud compution at Leeds Beckett

University provides a reliable case study for the best

ways to adopt and implement cloud computing

within educational institutions. The main aim of

using SAS at the institution is to improve the

educational outcomes of students through closer

monitoring by lectures. Hence, significant efforts

will be made for future research to explore the best

cloud computing frameworks being instrumental in

boosting educational outcomes in educational

institutions (Viswanath et al., 2012). Furthermore,

there should be an exploration of how costs could be

minimized through resource sharing among

educational institutions in their sharing of cloud

services. This will make it easier for institutions to

implement the project without being limited by their

tight budgets or financial situation. Another

approach is to use an implementation framework to

ensure that all Cloud services can be delivered on

time (Chang et al. 2013 b). The example include the

integration between Education as a Service and

Storage as illustrated by Chang et al., (2013 b).

7 CONCLUSION

In conclusion, cloud computing is geared toward

transforming the educational field through efficient

and reliable operations. Sharma and Ganpati (2013)

conclude that the ability of cloud computing to

reduce overall costs relating to IT infrastructure and

its capacity to boost data access at any given

location in educational institutions has been crucial

in promoting its adoption and usage in the

educational field. Universities such as the University

of Greenwich have been on the forefront of adopting

cloud computing and using it for research and

educational services. Additionally, Leeds Beckett

University’s SAS Cloud system has worked more

efficiently by giving lecturers the opportunity to

accurately monitor the progress of its students in

education and research. The educational field around

the world is gradually becoming technological

thanks to the evolution of cloud computing. The

reliability and efficiency of cloud computing

presents hope for the continuous growth of the

educational sector. However, educational institutions

need to beware of the common risks they could face

while utilizing cloud computing, such as virtual

threats and the loss of vital information. There needs

to be clear communication with the cloud providers

to mitigate such risks and benefit continuously from

the cloud in terms of minimal capital costs,

flexibility, and the provision of customized services

to students.

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