APPLICABILITY OF CLOUD COMPUTING IN ACADEMIA

The Indian Education sector has seen a tremendous rise in the field of higher education which has led to the demand for the automation of education sector at all the levels in order to cater to the need of information of various stakeholders. Due to burst in the field of communication technology every one expects the access of relevant information (what they should); in fast, accurate and anytime any where manner. Information management of the educational sector including statutory bodies for the purpose of transparency and controlthrough various information systems is the need and expectation of stakeholders. These stakeholders belong to different diversified background and have different perspectives and information need for their participation. The technological development in the abstraction and encapsulation of the IT resources has been successfully implemented with the help of cloud architecture. This technology not only caters to the various stakeholders; it also ensures the sharing, availability, security and reliability of information involved.This paper is a study of cloud based computing model with Indian Education as a scenario and comparing the various existing tools and applications that can be readily used or customized for educational purpose. It also proposes an architecture for the implementation of cloud computing in educational system. Finally, it concludes with the comparative study of various cloud based services available at different levels of cloud architecture for academia.