Demand for Cloud Services as an Infrastructure in Higher Education

Cloud computing is one of the major current trends in IS. It is said to be able to increase work productivity and simultaneously lower costs in organizations. However, institutions of higher education, like universities, remain hesitant to adopt it. The ‘NSA scandal’ and similar revelations lead to a sharp decline in trust (especially in Europe) in commercial cloud computing providers like Dropbox and Google. At the same time, cloud computing solutions often are not customized to students’ and employees’ needs. In this context, we examine the concept of ‘university cloud computing services’ by discussing it from the theoretical viewpoint as an ‘infrastructure.’ We conducted a large-scale survey with over 10,000 student respondents and employees from three universities. Our findings indicate a high demand for cloud computing at those universities and offer valuable implications for designing and managing cloud computing in a higher educational context.