Cloud Computing in Education: The Intersection of Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

In the last few years, in spite of concerns about the hype, cloud computing has expanded steadily both horizontally – across industries, and vertically – in organizations’ technology stacks. Most technologies that enable cloud services existed prior to cloud computing’s existence, although these days they rejuvenate, evolve and stimulate the computational ecosystem transformations. Actually the radical change for organizations is in rethinking and reengineering their traditional IT resources advancing them with cloud architectures and implementing services based on cloud computing delivery models. The change is underway on a large scale: from vendors and developers to providers and customers, and the key issues of “cloudiness” are not only in economics and management, but in provisioning, interoperability and security of the integrated services.

The Cloud Computing phenomenon likewise creates exciting challenges and opportunities for the entire educational system. For faculty, students, administration, and IT professionals it is a thrilling journey driven by many agendas–cost cutting, delivering dynamic mobile and interactive computational services, utilizing and leveraging integrated IT infrastructures and systems. This talk will explore the impact of cloud computing on the educational socio-technical system and will provide the author’s experience in strategizing and utilizing cloud-based applications and services.