Colleges and universities are beginning to investigate new, more-efficient and more-cost-effective ways to bring computing power and new applications and IT services to students, faculty members and institution staff. Gartner increasingly is fielding questions from CIOs and other high-level administrators at colleges and universities about the capabilities of "cloud computing."

Most colleges and universities have made their first forays into cloud computing via Google Gmail and the educational offerings from Google and Microsoft, although many IT leaders and administrators are not aware that those services are delivered via the cloud. Higher education IT leaders and administrators are asking Gartner whether cloud computing is "real" or hype, and if it can provide benefits in a higher education environment.

This research offers CIOs and college administrators a primer on cloud computing and its relevance to higher education.

Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing in which massively scalable IT resources are delivered as a service to users via Internet technologies. By "massively scalable," we mean that the IT capabilities have resources that greatly exceed average use patterns.

Elastically scalable cloud computing resources are distributed dynamically to a source, and then redistributed on demand in metered quantity and quality. By "elastically scalable," we mean that the cloud provides just-in-time, on-demand computing resources. The service (including software and data) resides on hardware that the customer does not own. Cloud computing is, in effect, the latest chapter in off-premises computing, somewhat similar to software as a service (SaaS) and application service provider (ASP) or third-party hosting service provisioning.

We see two motivators that drive an organization to explore cloud computing. One is cost savings, but it has to be a significant savings — for example, 50% or more, which underscores the interest in using cloud computing for e-mail. The second reason is that cloud computing allows users to do things that they otherwise couldn't do. For example, professors and students can collaborate and participate in peer review using cloud-provided applications that would have been otherwise cost- or storage-prohibitive.

People compare cloud computing to electricity, in which energy companies engineer their electricity grids to provide capacity to accommodate peak-load demand, such as during hot summer days. Very few people or organizations have their own power plants. However, that analogy breaks down in the case of IT. Now, people and organizations have their own IT. So unless you can give them significant benefits — such as huge cost savings or new capabilities — they will be reluctant to opt for a centralized service approach.

The quick answer is no. One of the best features of cloud computing is that there is no need for software or hardware. You don't need your own data center. You can use virtual machines in the sky instead. Internally, the basic technology of virtualization means that you can get a lot more out of existing hardware by virtualizing things on top of it and greatly increasing efficiency. The initial justification a virtualized environment often centers on the savings of so-called "hard" dollar costs, such as hardware maintenance, data center floor space, energy or heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning savings.

The biggest impact with any new approach to something is how it fits into existing resources and relationships. Few enterprises have the luxury of starting over from scratch in technology matters. Therefore, such factors as your investments in IT skills, your installed base and your relationships with vendors have a critical impact.

Some of the megavendors, although they are moving toward cloud computing, remain more focused on delivering traditional on-premises solutions or hosted solutions. However, IBM and Microsoft are taking different approaches.

IBM has a long history of making big investments — for example, in OnDemand, which is somewhat of a precursor to cloud computing. The idea of utility computing is something that IBM has a lot of experience with. More recently, IBM has started to adapt it to other aspects of its business, such as Lotus.

Microsoft is the vendor that we think has the most ambitious strategy. It is trying to expand and give a lot of choices to customers, including offering an on-premises or off-premises environment. Microsoft is building its own data centers and aims to continue to support the on-premises environment while also allowing for third-party hosting (see "Microsoft SharePoint Online and IBM LotusLive Drive Content to the 'Cloud'").

Whatever these smaller vendors choose to write to and use as the platform of record for their offerings, they need to examine all aspects of their vendor dependencies, including determining if their products are able to move to the cloud. For example, if the vendors have been using some of Microsoft's new initiatives, such as xRM (Anything Relationship Management), which is sort of a second-generation customer relationship management (CRM) solution, that will move pretty well into the cloud. CRM applications in the enrollment management and recruiting arena will likely be able to move to the cloud. And, if colleges and universities are using something else, for example, an ASP.NET approach, that will move pretty well to the cloud.

Providers to higher education are uniquely positioned because they offer human resources, finance and student systems — what we call the higher education administrative suite. These are the core critical administrative applications that run in most universities.

IT leaders in higher education are curious, even concerned, about whether these vendors, and others, will change how they provide systems and solutions. For example, university CIOs are asking, "Is the licensing model going to change?" and, "How will cloud computing affect what's happening in our IT shop?"

Those are the key questions that vendors need to answer. However, we believe that vendors serving higher education are more interested in maintaining the status quo. Most of what they are doing is moving toward hosting services or SaaS models.

Internal clouds are a controversial subject. People use that term — whether it be internal cloud, private cloud or intracloud — to convey a notion similar to the concept of an intranet bringing Internet and Web ideas into enterprises. Although you can do the same kind of thing with the cloud, confusion arises over the two different views of cloud computing — a user view versus a provider view.

Those that provide the service manage the data centers and pay the bills to provide the computing capabilities in that cloud. They are concerned about costs — for example, power and cooling expenses and specific technologies (virtual machines, for example). From the consumer point of view, users don't care how things work — they just work. That's the whole idea of delivery of a service.

The cloud can be used for internal research collaboration. There are certain economies of scale that you can achieve, and there might be security or regulatory factors that would be an argument for doing that in-house. For example, in very large institutions or throughout an academic community in general, it may make sense to provide these kinds of shared environments.

However, in a lot of cases, it may make more sense to seek a vendor to provide that environment, whether it's a niche vendor or a big vendor like Google, Facebook or other social networking resources or off-premises storage facilitators.

Yes, mainly concerning e-mail. Some institutions are concerned about who "owns" the e-mail, especially if Gmail or Microsoft were to be subpoenaed in, for example, a college sexual harassment or hate case. Another issue is that, in some geographies (for example, Australia), government rules prevent digital data from being stored outside of the country. Uncertainties concerning these mainly student issues will be cleared up. Nonetheless, both the institutions and the cloud service providers like Google and Microsoft are beginning to embrace the concept that student and faculty collaboration, document management, messaging and e-mail can be made secure and safely used via cloud computing. That can save an institution a lot of money if it in a sense gets out of the e-mail business.

However, colleges and universities will likely not be putting administrative applications — covering student records, transcripts or HR data — on the cloud until provider offerings for these types of administrative applications are more mature as a SaaS offering, which includes security appropriate for level of need. These applications will be the last to make the move to the cloud in higher education.

Students are bringing their own computing environments with them. Increasingly, more of that environment and the relationships they have with services that live on their digital devices are going to derive from the cloud. Today, that means services such as Google, e-mail and other Web e-mail, and Facebook and other activities and sites.

Increasingly, students will start making use of storage in the cloud and other things we have not even thought of yet that will become popular in the consumer market. Education is one the areas where we will see the effects of these things first because of these younger people's embrace of technology.

Gartner, in a 2008 survey of higher education CIOs, identified that one top issue of concern for CIOs was the worry that they had to allow every kind of personal device to have access to the institutional network, and that these devices were disposable and changing constantly. However, if core administrative systems eventually are stored in the cloud, students could have access to and interact with the institution's network in the cloud. Security would likely be more enhanced in the cloud than on the college's or university's campus network. That is because the cloud is the service provider's business, and that business would need to be effective and secure, or you wouldn't put your resources there. At the same time, it's important to realize that the interest of the providers is not the same as what your interests are. They do align a lot, but are not exactly the same. In terms of the overall security, that is something that is best discussed by security experts.