'You just wanna sign on the dotted line and hope for the best': Navigating the Cloudscapes of Higher Education
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Cloud-hosted environments are increasingly being adopted in both industry and academia alike, with marketing material and popular belief holding a myriad of conjectures as to why this adoption progresses. There is, however, a limited understanding of the factors that influence the decision to move to the cloud and the challenges encountered on this migration journey, grounded in data, specifically in the context of higher education. To address this gap, we perform an in-depth qualitative investigation to better understand the human factors of cloud adoption in universities. We engaged with 18 participants via semi-structured interviews and analysed the data using thematic analysis. We present our findings around three main themes - the decision matrix, the people-centric transition and the guardians of data - to comprehend the landscape of cloud migration ( cloudscape ) in higher education. Our findings highlight that cloud migrations go beyond a technical transformation. While they regularly encompass shifts in people's roles and mindsets, cloud adoption in the absence of such a shift may lead to patterns that triggered the move away from self-hosted and on-premise solutions in the first place. Furthermore, we find interaction effects between the technical depth of decision makers in contrast to necessary risk acceptance in the context of cloud adoption, thereby further adding to the broader discussion regarding the place of academia in monopolistic markets.
DOI: 10.1145/3757448
Authors: Simran Munot, Tobias Fiebig, Mannat Kaur
Institution: Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415259379