Sailing the cloud: a case study of perceptions and changing roles in an australian university

Cloud computing is a popular buzzword in the IT industry, and promoted as a concept that will afford organizations scalable computing resources from external providers on a pay-per-use basis. With the minimization of in-house IT infrastructures, organizations have been promised sizable cost savings and reduced administrative hurdles, making it an attractive outsourcing proposition for non-IT enterprises, such as universities, whose IT departments have been riddled with budget cuts, and increased workloads. However, cloud computing has its share of risks and can challenge the authority of an organization’s central IT authority. This paper presents a case study of a large Australian university, with a risk-averse IT department, that has begun to engage in cloud computing, and elucidates the perceptions of senior IT managers on their motivations to adopt cloud computing and their concerns over their future role as influential policy-makers in the enterprise.