ARE CLOUD ENABLED VIRTUAL LABS ECONOMICAL?: A Case Study Analyzing Cloud based Virtual Labs for Educational Purposes

摘要

Cost efficiency is an often mentioned strength of cloud computing (Talukader et al., 2010). In times of decreasing educational budgets virtual labs provided by cloud computing might be an interesting alternative for higher education organizations or IT training facilities. This contribution analyzes the cost advantage of virtual educational labs provided via cloud computing means and compare these costs to costs of classical educational labs provided in a dedicated manner. This contribution develops a four step decision making model which might be interesting for colleges, universities or other IT training facilities planning to implement cloud based training facilities. Furthermore this contribution provides interesting findings when cloud computing has economical advantages in education and when not. The developed four step decision making model of general IaaS* applicability can be used to find out whether an IaaS cloud based virtual IT lab approach is more cost efficient than a dedicated approach.