Towards a framework to enable the migration process to educational clouds in Saudi higher education

Abstract

Nowadays, Universities have become more reliant on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to provide educational services for their stakeholders. While most of the Universities in Europe and North America has harnessed the capabilities of cloud services to provide large scale flexibly electronic educational services. In Saudi Arabia, most of the Universities are start-ups with limited IT Staff and ICT infrastructure. Therefore, migrating their ICT services to cloud computing could deliver substantial benefits in the form of rich education content, increased efficiency, and agility that can be used to transform higher education in Saudi universities. However, to successfully migrate to the cloud in the Saudi universities context, it is essential to identify the enabler factors that contribute toward a successful migration to the cloud environment in the higher education settings. Therefore, this research paper proposes a framework to investigate technological and organizational success factors that enable the migration process of the Saudi Universities' ICT to the cloud environment.