Cost-Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing in Education Using the Base Cost Estimation Model

Cloud computing is one of technology's miracle workers that fulfill today's needs. Especially with the current economic crisis due to COVID-19 and the demand for higher quality education, schools and colleges are under increasing pressure to deliver more from less. To aid this issue, educational institutions can utilize cloud computing to increase their capacity without requiring heavy infrastructure investments while lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). However, despite the dependence on technology and its vast development, many institutions are still hesitant to make the right choice by going cloud. Because of this, the researcher intends to analyze the Data Center's expenditures at Universitas Klabat and compare them with pricing estimations made in the cloud so that the university can gain an idea of how much the data center truly costs and whether going cloud can minimize the costs. The method used by the researcher to obtain data used in measurement through interviews, financial data of the university's data center in three years, 2018-2020. The physical data center will be calculated by a framework derived from a previous cost-benefit analysis of the cloud computing framework by Nanath and Pillai. As for the cloud data center, the cost estimations will be made based on the servers' specifications analyzed from the data while comparing two cloud providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The calculations on the physical data center costs, the AWS cloud costs, and the Azure cloud cost are then compared to find which alternative has the least expenditures. It is found that alternative Microsoft Azure is the most affordable among others. However, interestingly, the highest cost among the three alternatives is the AWS cloud cost instead of the physical data center cost. Because of this, it is found that the cloud data center can be more affordable than the physical data center depending on the cloud provider that any company uses. In addition, cloud computing, particularly with Microsoft Azure as its provider, can be worth the shift to UNKLAB from a financial standpoint.