Use of cloud-based services for higher education in developing countries
R.G.N. Meegama, S. P. Wickramasinghe, Sri Santhi Lanka · 2015
With frequent power outages and labor issues, maintaining a server room to provide information technology (IT) related services to students and staff without any interruptions remains a challenging task in all higher educational institutes in developing countries. Although technical personnel involved in maintaining such a system know very well how difficult it is to keep the system running without hampering academic activities, often, the faculty and students are unaware of technical issues pertaining to providing such important services to the community. Prolonged power failures and red tape involved in procurement of urgent equipment have further aggravated this situation especially in state owned higher educational institutes. As a solution to overcome the above issue, we propose a cloud-based system that not only provides uninterrupted e-learning facilities to students but also hosts all IT related services such as library management, collaboration platform, human resource management, student management, etc. at an extremely low cost. Hosting all IT services in the cloud relieves the educational institute from maintaining backup generators and power supplies, air conditioners, hiring electricians on roster basis for full time monitoring of devices, cost of high-end servers to host the services and also reduceshigh energy consumption costs. Such a cloud based implementation, installed and configured with an open source operating system and application software, proves that for approximately US $170.00, we can provide all IT related services required for a higher educational institute in a developing country without any interruptions at all.