Before cloud computing, companies needed to house large data centers in order to provide managed services to their clients. This required companies to invest large amounts of money in land, electricity, materials, and labor. Cloud computing gives businesses and end users access to unlimited amounts of computing power without the high cost of hosting servers.
The education industry can benefit highly from cloud computing. Cloud computing in education is a new concept that more and more institutions are beginning to adapt to and implement. Educational institutions using a private cloud can make their curriculum more efficient and direct more resources to teaching. For example, if a professor wants to write their own class material, a dedicated cloud would allow the institution to store the materials on their cloud in a digital form for all students to access, rather than having to pay to either have the materials published or pay to self-publish. This can be especially beneficial to institutions that aim to provide a lot of financial aid to students.
Cloud computing in education has great benefits when it comes to physical space. Institutions often have limited space and having to support a large server network can end up filling up valuable space. You can expand a private cloud as much as you want and never have to worry about filling up physical space.
One of the most valuable benefits of cloud computing is you can increase power and bandwidth whenever needed. In a self-hosted computer network at the institution, this would mean replacing servers and having to find a place to store the old servers, and this would also mean having to replace network equipment and potentially needing the ISP to run new cable. These costs can all be avoided with cloud computing.
In a cost-sensitive industry such as education, cloud computing provides many savings, such as being able to support bring-your-own-device, allowing institutions to focus on their main goals while still providing the computing power that students and faculty need and expect.
