An overview of cloud services adoption challenges in higher education institutions

Information Technology (IT) plays an important role in enabling education services be delivered to users. Most education online services in universities have been run on the cloud to provide services to support students, lecturers, researchers and administration staff. These are enabled with the emergence of cloud computing in the world of IT. Cloud computing offers on demand Internet-based computing services. This paper presents an overview of cloud computing adoption in higher education, mainly tertiary institutions and universities. The focus of the paper is the challenges of cloud computing in higher education. It introduces the background to cloud computing and reviews research on adoption challenges in higher education institutions. These challenges are important as they provide an overview of the adoption of cloud in higher education. The authors proposed an integrated reference model based on the challenges in the literature integrated with TAM model to investigate the factors influence the users’ attitudes and behaviors toward using cloud education services in universities ICT provision