Cloud computing: A key enabler for higher education in Sultanate of Oman

In Sultanate of Oman, higher education institutions have devoted significant human and fiscal investments in IT to support the priorities tied to teaching and learning. However, there are still issues in current high education systems associated with high cost and inefficiency in-terms of scalability, flexibility, availability, data recovery, accessibility and security due to the growing need for IT infrastructure including servers, storage and software. Higher education institutes have to spend more on hardware and software purchasing, maintenance, upgrading and licensing. Cloud computing emerged as an Internet based solution, whereby computing resources are provided to consumers and organizations as services on demand on pay per use bases. Cloud computing provides higher education information delivery, communication and collaboration. It enables the education organizations to scale their IT infrastructure while reducing the administrative burden. Cloud computing facilitates greater levels of provisioning and automation in cost effective manner. However, still there are some issues regarding to security, privacy and trust that acts as a barrier against full adoption of cloud computing in higher education. Throughout this paper we identify the cloud offerings, issues and strategy of implementation.