Search results

This paper aims to explore the educational potential of “cloud computing” (CC), and how it could be exploited in enhancing engagement among educational researchers and educators to better understand and improve their practice, in increasing the quality of their students' learning outcomes, and, thus, in advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in a higher education context.

Adoption of the ideals of SoTL is considered an important approach for salvaging the higher education landscape around the world that is currently in a state of flux and evolution as a result of rapid advances in information and communications technology, and the subsequent changing needs of the digital natives. The study is based on ideas conceptualised from reading several editorials and articles on server virtualisation technology and cloud computing in several journals, with the eSchool News as the most important one. The paper identifies two cloud computing tools, their salient features and describes how cloud computing can be used to achieve the ideals of SoTL.

The study reports that the cloud as a ubiquitous computing tool and a powerful platform can enable educators to practise the ideals of SoTL. Two of the most useful free “cloud computing” applications are the Google Apps for Education which is a free online suite of tools that includes Gmail for e‐mail and Google Docs for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and Microsoft's cloud service (Live@edu) including the SkyDrive. Using the cloud approach, everybody can work on the same document at the same time to make corrections as well as improve it dynamically in a collaborative manner.

Cloud computing has a significant place in higher education in that the appropriate use of cloud computing tools can enhance engagement among students, educators, and researchers in a cost effective manner. There are security concerns but they do not overshadow the benefits.

The paper provides insights into the possibility of using cloud computing delivery for originating a new instructional paradigm that makes a shift possible from the traditional practice of teaching as a private affair to a peer‐reviewed transparent process, and makes it known how student learning can be improved generally, not only in one's own classroom but also beyond it.

The purpose of this paper is to presents an analysis of geographically and disciplinary scattered academic publications of cloud computing (CC) research in information systems. This review aims to understand the research methodology, research frameworks and models, geographical distribution, trends, critical factors and causal relationships associated with cloud computing adoption (CCA).

Systematic-literature-review using natural language processing is conducted to explore the phenomenon. The relevant research studies are extracted from various online databases using quality-assessment-criteria.

The study is a novel attempt to highlight the differences in critical factors for CCA in different country-settings. Further, the research explores the causal relationships among the identified factors. The findings of this 12-year systematic-review contribute by aiding the providers and potential adopters to devise context-specific strategies for the penetration of cloud services and sound adoption decisions (ADs), respectively. The findings also highlight the prospective avenues of research in the domain for researchers. Using the in-depth analysis, conceptual frameworks have been proposed that can assist in exploring the pre-adoption and post-adoption of CC.

This study contributes to CCA research by providing holistic insights into the methodology, research framework and models, geographical focus, critical factors and causal relationships influencing the AD or intention. The review highlights the unexplored emerging research topics in the field of CCA for future research directions.

Cloud Computing (CC) technology is getting implemented rapidly in the educational sector to improve learning, research and other administrative process. As evident from the literature review, most of these implementations are happening in the western countries such as USA, UK, while the level of implementation of CC in developing countries such as India is rare. Moreover, implementing CC technology in the educational sector require various decisions to be made by the managers of the Information Technology (IT) department such as selecting suitable deployment model, vendor providing cloud service, etc. in their respective university or institute. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to address one such decision. Since, different types of CC deployment are available; selecting a suitable one plays a key role, as it might have an impact on the requirements of various stakeholders such as students, teachers, administrative staff (especially the staff members in the IT department), etc. apart from affecting the overall performance of the facilities such as a laboratory. Naturally, a proper decision by analysing multiple perspectives has to be made while carrying out such strategic initiatives by any educational institute.

A case study methodology has been chosen as the research methodology to discuss and demonstrate the above decision problem that was faced in real time by one of the educational institutes in India, offering high-quality management education. The IT managers of this institute were planning to switch over to CC technology for the computer laboratory and they have to make a decision of choosing suitable alternative CC deployment models such as private cloud (PRC), public cloud (PUC), community cloud (COC), hybrid cloud (HYC), etc. by analysing and comparing them based on various factors and perspectives such as elasticity, availability, scalability, etc. Since, multiple factors are involved in making such a strategic decision, the most commonly used Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model – namely, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as a decision support during the decision making process.

The team of decision makers, who were planning to implement CC in the case institute, found that PRC is best as they believed that it would provide adequate cost savings, apart from providing necessary security to maintain confidential information such as student's detail, grades, etc.

The results obtained are based on a single case study. Hence, they cannot be generalized for institutions across educational sector. However, the decision making situation and understanding its impact on the stakeholders of the educational institute can be common across various educational institute.

Using a real-life case study of an educational institute, this paper presented a strategic decision making situation, which needs to be considered by the IT managers of the educational institutes when they decide to switch over to CC technology. Various criteria to be considered during the decision making process was identified from the literature review were identified and enumerated. These factors would useful for the IT managers of the different educational institute and they can suitably add or delete these decision criteria as per their requirements and situation at hand. Moreover, the algorithm of AHP, which was used as a decision support, was presented in a step-by-step manner, which should be beneficial for the practitioners to apply the same for similar decision making situations.

It is believed that this paper would be the first to report on a strategic decision of choosing the deployment model for CC technology especially in the educational sector. Similarly, this paper would also contribute to the field of CC, as it lists out the decision criteria that are to be considered for making the above decision, which has not got adequate importance. Lastly, this paper is also unique in the realm of AHP because application for a decision problem in the field of CC especially in the educational sector is least reported.

Grid computing, cloud computing (CC), utility computing and software as a service are emerging technologies predicted to result in massive consolidation as meta‐level computing services of everything beneath one umbrella in the future. The purpose of this study is to foster the understanding and differentiation, by using the three aforementioned types of computing technologies and software, as a service by both public and private libraries to meet their expectations and strategic objectives.

The approach in this study is a review based on comparing the four computing technologies with a brief analysis for researching and designing the mind map of a new meta‐level computing service approach, taking into consideration the need for new economic tariff and pricing models as well as service‐level agreements.

Since it is anticipated that there will be likely potential consolidation and integration of computing services, a study of these four most advanced computing technologies and their methodologies is presented through their definition, characteristics, functionalities, advantages and disadvantages. This is a well‐timed technological advancement for libraries.

It appears that the future of library services will become even more integrated, running over CC platforms based on usage rather than just storage of data.

Libraries will become an open useful resource to all and sundry in a global context, and that will have huge societal benefits never imagined before.

Concisely addresses the strategies, functional characteristics, advantages and disadvantages by comparing these technologies from several service aspects with a view to assisting in creating the next generation outer space computing.

This study aims to explore the influence of contingent factors on the assimilation of the cloud enterprises resources plan (ERP) system in the UAE’s public sector. It explains the relationship between institutional logics and institutional work while implementing ERP-based cloud computing (CC) to transform the government.

This study uses qualitative methods and an interpretive approach to provide an in-depth explanation for a detailed case study in the public sector. The institutional logics framework has been used to inform the integration between ERP system and CC in the public sector case.

Findings show that the UAE public sector could align institutional work processes with the inbuilt logics of ERP-based CC, resulting in successful assimilation of the cloud version. This study concludes that institutional pressures in highly institutionalized environments will generate organizational responses, but those responses are dependent upon and influenced by aspects of organizational culture. This study found that the organizational culture has led to a radical change by implementing the cloud ERP system and institutionalizing its usage toward transforming government. Moreover, ERP assimilation is the extent to which an organization has developed from understanding the ERP system’s functionalities to mastering and deploying them in their processes.

This study has important implications and contributions to the literature in three ways. First, this study examines an understudied topic, the interaction between CC and institutional logics. Second, this study contributes to the public sector research by providing a fine-tuned interpretation of the organization’s strategic behavior in response to a new information technology (IT) trend. Finally, this study also focuses on this new trend of CC which can influence the global IT industry, and it is worthy of being considered.

Explanatory case study research has a value to the public sector that one might be discovering new phenomena while analyzing the public sector case. The implementation of cloud ERP is one of the best methods of integrating technology with the public sector’s organizational, technical, economic, social, cultural and other environmental domains.

Virtual machines (VMs) are suggested by the providers of cloud services as the services for the users over the internet. The consolidation of VM is the tactic of the competent and smart utilization of resources from cloud data centers. Placement of a VM is one of the significant issues in cloud computing (CC). Physical machines in a cloud environment are aware of the way of the VM placement (VMP) as the mapping VMs. The basic target of placement of VM issue is to reduce the physical machines' items that are running or the hosts in cloud data centers. The VMP methods have an important role in the CC. However, there is no systematic and complete way to discuss and analyze the algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic survey of VMP techniques. Also, the benefits and weaknesses connected with selected VMP techniques have been debated, and the significant issues of these techniques are addressed to develop the more efficient VMP technique for the future.

Because of the importance of VMP in the cloud environments, in this paper, the articles and important mechanisms in this domain have been investigated systematically. The VMP mechanisms have been categorized into two major groups, including static and dynamic mechanisms.

The results have indicated that an appropriate VMP has the capacity to decrease the resource consumption rate, energy consumption and carbon emission rate. VMP approaches in computing environment still need improvements in terms of reducing related overhead, consolidation of the cloud environment to become an extremely on-demand mechanism, balancing the load between physical machines, power consumption and refining performance.

This study aimed to be comprehensive, but there were some limitations. Some perfect work may be eliminated because of applying some filters to choose the original articles. Surveying all the papers on the topic of VMP is impossible, too. Nevertheless, the authors are trying to present a complete survey over the VMP.

The consequences of this research will be valuable for academicians, and it can provide good ideas for future research in this domain. By providing comparative information and analyzing the contemporary developments in this area, this research will directly support academics and working professionals for better knowing the growth in the VMP area.

The gathered information in this paper helps to inform the researchers with the state of the art in the VMP area. Totally, the VMP's principal intention, current challenges, open issues, strategies and mechanisms in cloud systems are summarized by explaining the answers.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of current uses of cloud computing (CC) services in libraries, address a gap identified in integrating cloud storage in IaaS level, and show how to use EC2 tools for easy backup and resource monitoring.

The article begins a literature review of CC uses in libraries, organized at the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS levels. The author presents his experience of integrating cloud storage services S3 and GCS. In addition, he also shows how to use virtual machine EC2 tools for backup and monitoring resources.

The article describes a case study of integrating cloud storage using S3 and GCS. S3 can be integrated with any program whether the program runs on cloud or locally, while GCS is only good for applications running on GAE. The limitation of the current GCS approach makes it hard to use for a stand‐alone cloud storage. The author also discusses virtual machines using EC2 and its related tools for backup, increase storage, and monitoring service. These services make system administration easier as compared to the traditional approach.

The article presents current CC uses in libraries at the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS levels. CC services are changing quickly. For example, Google has stated that its APIs are experimental. Readers should be aware of this.

The author shows his experience of integrating cloud storage services. Readers can understand the similarities and differences between S3 and GCS. In addition, readers can learn the advantages and concerns associated with implementing cloud computing. Readers are encouraged to consider questions such as content, skills, costs, and security.

There are many uses of CC services in libraries. However, gaps are identified: in IaaS cloud storage, a few libraries used Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, but none explored using Google Cloud Storage (GCS); none provided implementation details, difficulties, and comparisons of S3 and GCS; and a few articles have briefly discussed implementations on Amazon EC2, but have not provided specific details about upgrade and backup. This article addresses those gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability of cloud computing (CC) and the challenges that contribute to more successful projects with a major sustainable construction development.

The previous studies provided information on CC implementation barriers, which were then evaluated by 104 construction stakeholders through a questionnaire survey. As a result, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) approach was used to investigate these barriers. Furthermore, a partial least square structural equation model was used to build a model of these barriers (PLS-SEM).

The EFA results revealed that the above-noted factors are in a close relation with three key components, i.e. social, economic and communication. In addition, the proposed model results found the social barrier a key challenge to the implementation of CC.

The results from this study can help decision-makers to improve the approaches regarding data fragmentation that has great effects on the execution of all construction projects. The focus of the paper is to enhance the data fragmentation processes. In addition, the results would be useful to strengthen the sustainability of existing construction projects by enhancing the implementation of CC.

The novelty of this research work will provide a solid foundation for critically assessing and appreciating the different barriers affecting the adoption of CC.

The paper focuses on reviewing and theorizing the factors that affect the adoption of cloud computing in the education sector narrowing the focus to developing countries such as India.

Through an extensive literature survey, critical factors of cloud computing for education were identified. Further, the fuzzy DEMATEL approach was used to define their interrelationship and its cause and effect.

A total of 17 factors were identified for the study based on the literature survey and experts' input. These factors were classified as causes and effects and ranked and interrelated. “Required Learning Skills and Attitude,” “Lack of Infrastructure,” “Learners' Ability” and “Increased Investment” are found to be the most influential factors.

The resultant ranking factors can be used as a basis for managing the process of cloud adoption in several institutions. The study could guide academicians, policymakers and government authorities for the effective adoption of cloud computing in education.

The study investigates interdependency amongst the factors of cloud computing for education in context with developing economy. This is one of first study in higher education institutes of India.

The Cloud of Things (IoT) that refers to the integration of the Cloud Computing (CC) and the Internet of Things (IoT), has dramatically changed the way treatments are done in the ubiquitous computing world. This integration has become imperative because the important amount of data generated by IoT devices needs the CC as a storage and processing infrastructure. Unfortunately, security issues in CoT remain more critical since users and IoT devices continue to share computing as well as networking resources remotely. Moreover, preserving data privacy in such an environment is also a critical concern. Therefore, the CoT is continuously growing up security and privacy issues. This paper focused on security and privacy considerations by analyzing some potential challenges and risks that need to be resolved. To achieve that, the CoT architecture and existing applications have been investigated. Furthermore, a number of security as well as privacy concerns and issues as well as open challenges, are discussed in this work.