A Cloud-Based Sustainable Business Model for Effective ICT Provision in Higher Education

Given that the Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are witnessed to expand the size of their network at a wider scale, their utilization of the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is also increasing rapidly. Now-a-days, rather relying on private agents and outsourcing the resources, HE institutes are deploying and maintaining their own IT infrastructures. This leads to the increased number of massive deployments of IT resources across the globe. Such activities not only incur massive investments but also consume more power and considerably act as environmental pollutants. It is practically not possible to restrict the HE institutes from deploying their own resources, since outsourcing is becoming costlier. But, it is relatively important for the HE institutes to control their datacentres from substantially polluting the environment without losing their revenue. With this in mind, this research work proposes a Cloud based business model for HEIs for the purpose of facilitating effective sustainable ICT provisions. An important contribution of this paper is the guideline for choosing right Cloud services with supporting experiment results.