Cost benefit analysis of cloud computing in education

In the current financial crisis and the growing need for quality education, the educational institutions are under increasing pressure to deliver more from less. Both public as well as private institutions can use the potential benefit of cloud computing to deliver better services even with fewer resources. Application of Cloud Computing in Education not only relieve the educational Institutions from the burden of handling the complex IT Infrastructure management as well as maintenance activities but also lead to huge cost savings. Government of India is having the ambitious plan to raise the present 16 million enrolments in higher education to 42 million by 2020 as well as interconnect electronically India´s 572 universities, 25,000 colleges and at least 2,000 polytechnics for enabling e-learning and content sharing across country. The lunch of low cost, affordable Aakash tablet PCs for the student community is likely to increase the number of users´ for educational online resources exponentialy. In this paper we have studied about the benefit of use of cloud computing by educational institutions.