Understanding Cloud Computing in a Higher Education Context

Background

CC is a relatively new phenomenon in the technology industry, developed from traditional hosting, which is becoming pervasive in numerous sectors (Armbrust, 2010). Mell and Grance (2011) consider it “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (p.2). It is not clear when the term CC was officially coined, because it has been used for many years in network diagrams to depict an area of uncertainty (Stevenson, 2009). It is believed the term was coined in 2006 when large companies such as Google and Amazon Web Services started naming their hosting services as CC (Regalado, 2011). CC has been viewed as a disruptive technology; as Krikos (2011) puts it, “CC has all the markings of a disruptive technology—those that change the game as it’s currently played both by traditional software licensing companies and by private, on-premises datacenters” (p.2). A disruptive technology often begins by only satisfying a niche segment of the market—for example CC being best suited to businesses ‘born on CC’—and later expanding to other sectors (Danneels, 2004).

From a technical perspective, the extant CC literature posits different CC service models:

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  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): When the customer is able to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources.

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  Software as a Service (SaaS): Which allows the consumer to access the provider’s applications running on a cloud solutions (CS) but cannot manage the underlying infrastructure.

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  Platform as a Service (PaaS): Where the customer can control the applications but not the infrastructure (e.g. Mell and Grance, 2011).

Further, CC types may also vary; from ‘Private Cloud’ (a high cost option but also the most secure, often preferred by banks and governments), through to ‘Community’ (shared by multiple organizations), ‘Public’ (allowing pay-per-use) and finally ‘Hybrid’ (a mix of the previous) (Chou, 2015).