Cloud Computing in Higher Education: A Guide to Evaluation and Adoption

Executive Summary Public cloud computing—delivering infrastructure, services, and software on demand through the network—offers attractive advantages to higher education. For example, it has the potential to reduce information and communications technology (IT) costs by virtualizing capital assets such as disk storage and processing cycles into a readily available, affordable operating expense. Sometimes selecting a public cloud offering can create risk around security, privacy, interoperability, or performance. When it does, universities should consider private cloud deployment models to realize scale on demand, rapid platform deployment, and lower costs and carbon emissions while minimizing risk.