A Framework Strategy to Overcome Trust Issues on Cloud Computing Adoption in Higher Education

Cloud Computing (CC)

There are number of CC definitions cited in the existing body of literature. A well-known definition cited by Sultan (2010) refers to CC as a cluster of data centers that offers a range of on-demand resources and services over the internet. CC also refers to the scalable IT resources that are offered to users over a network as an alternative to hosting these resources in-house. Therefore, there is a much wider concept of unified and centralised technology and shared services (Metheny, 2017).

Supporters of CC claim that organisations do not have to face burden of upfront infrastructure costs and allows them to focus their attention towards their core business practices if they adopt the technology (Armbrust et al., 2010; CSA, 2011; Hesarlo, 2014; Thilakarathne & Wijayanayake, 2014). CC is also a good method to rapidly deploy applications with minimal management and maintenance. This allows organisational information communication technologies (ICT) to be rapidly adapted to meet an organisation’s changing and unanticipated business needs and demands (Willcocks et al., 2014). For higher education, it can exploit this opportunity to enhance IT agility and ultimately facilitate a number of institutional practices such as teaching, research and innovation activities via the cloud (Encalada & Sequera, 2017).