Cloud computing adoption at higher educational institutions in the KSA for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Rapid changes in the advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) have prompted Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) to enhance teaching and learning. Over the years, cloud computing (CC) has become an emerging and adoptable paradigm in many industries including healthcare, finance, and law with its promising benefits. This trend is also growing in the field of education around the globe. Due to its inherent qualities of reliability, scalability, flexibility and reasonable cost, cloud is the solution that addressed the accessibility issue for quality education. CC plays an important role and will have major impacts on HEIs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in the near future. HEIs are used to utilize the benefits of CC based services provided by the cloud service providers (CSPs). The CSP can be owned by the KSA government, private, or third-party vendors. By using cloud-based services at HEIs, staff, faculty, and students can utilize its services to perform various academic responsibilities on demand. This paper aims to adopt CC for HEIs and explore the prominent features and potential benefits of adopting cloud services in the HEIs of KSA. This paper also reveals numerous challenges, impacts, and major issues involved in adopting cloud services for HEIs.