Trends in Distance Education and Open Learning: Policy ... - ADEA

12. Cloud computingThe traditional approach to IT is not working. The current model of building application andserver silos does not meet the dynamic needs of an organization in a competitive marketplace. Today IT is expensive, unresponsive and consumes vast amounts of capital,delivering resources which in the end are grossly underutilized. Most servers are utilizedonly 20% or less. This approach of throwing expensive assets at every business need, isinflexible, time consuming and costly. This would be analogous to deploying a smallgenerator to supply each of your offices with electricity. In the future, IT must offer acompetitive service model delivering infrastructure and computer resources in plug-playand bill-me-for-use service. This is where cloud is taking us.Cloud computing is an IT delivery model that provides infrastructure and computerresources as a service. By implementing a private cloud, IT leverages the power of sharingto maximize the utilization of compute, networking and storage resources within anorganization. The result is more rapid and efficient delivery of IT services, faster time tomarket, and reduced IT capital and operating expenditures. Moreover, the cloud isaccessible anywhere at anytime with a hand held device.There are currently 3 types of services provided by private clouds.Platform as a Service (PaaS): The development environment or platform is hereremotely accessed for the development of applications and services.Software as a Service (SaaS): the software application is remotely accessed.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): the hosting and server infrastructure resides inthe cloudServer virtualization is a key building block to cloud computing that enables applicationisolation, mobility, and partitioning of individual servers in the cloud. Applications areplaced into virtual machines (VM’s) which simplify the provisioning and configuration ofapplication environments in the cloud, allowing for easier reconfiguration of resources tomeet business demand.The advent of public and private clouds will lower substantially the cost of ownership andROI for the educational institutions in terms of server infrastructure, maintenance, securityand so on. Nevertheless the two main concerns are data security and adequate bandwidth.Security and privacy are important features in mLearning if an institution intends to movetowards formalization in terms of curriculum, assessment and ethics. All institutions wanttheir curriculum to be protected from plagiarism and discourage cheating in assessment.Cheating with mobile phones is very common during examination sessions. If an institution54