Critical Success Factors for Cloud Migration in Higher Education Institutions: A Conceptual Framework

In the last few years, the cloud-computing paradigm experienced a considerable growth, making it the de-facto technology fueling almost all major online services. 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 amateur 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, migrating the Universities resources to third party platforms as cloud computing has pitfalls need to be considered carefully prior to the transition. Therefore, 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 aims to propose a framework to investigate technological and organizational success factors that enable the migration process of the Saudi Universities’ ICT to the cloud environment.