Cost Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing in Education Deka Ganesh Chandra DGE&T, MoLE, New Delhi-1, India E-mail: ganeshdeka2000@gmail.com Malaya Dutta Borah DTU, New Delhi -42, India E-mail: malayadutta@dce.ac.in Abstract—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. Keywords—National Knowledge Network (NKN);Virtual Computing Lab(VCL);Meta-University; Cloud Computing & Total Cost of Ownership(TOC). I. INTRODUCTION Financial crisis as well as the exponential demand for quality education has put the educational institutions is under increasing pressure to deliver more from less. By sharing IT services and resources among themselves educational institutions can better concentrate on their core academic and research activities. Cloud computing is an evolutionary step in computing that unifies the resources of many computers to function as single entity, allowing the construction of massively scalable systems that can take in and store, process and analyze all the data[2] of an organization. With cloud computing as part of IT strategy, an organization can increase their capacity without compromising security or requiring the educational institutions to make heavy infrastructure investments while helping to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Therefore they need to find ways to offer rich and inexpensive services and tools [1] for academic and research activities with the right balance of on-premise and cloud services. By combining the best practices of Virtualization, Grid computing, Utility computing and Web technologies the Cloud computing is a resultant computing infrastructure that inherits the agility of Virtualization, scalability of Grid computing and simplicity of Web 2.0. Cloud Computing is a recurring expenditure model and is much like telephone or electricity expenditure and hence it is accounted as standard Operating Expense (OpEx). OpEx is beneficial as it gives the flexibility to terminate costs at will. With a capital purchase, the server or software being acquired is fully committed to regardless of whether it is being utilized or not. The ongoing costs by way of depreciation or financing costs still need to be borne contrast to OpEx, where, in case the item is no longer required, payments can be stopped accordingly. Due to this reason many organizations prefer leasing vehicles in place of purchasing them outright. In this paper we have compared the costs of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) versus Desktop Virtualization (Cost per User per Month) model for an organization of 30 users for a period of 3 years. Another analysis for replacing 5 PCs for an Office environment by shifting to cloud computing for an analysis period of 3 years was also found very impressive in terms of cost savings as well as other benefits like relieve from the burden of maintenance of computing infrastructure etc. The rest of this paper is organized into 9 Sections. Section- 2 is about cloud computing application in education while section-3 is about the virtual computing lab. In Section-4 we have made a comparative study on Cloud versus Total Cost of Ownership. In section-5 we have mentioned about cloud initiative in Singapore Polytechnic. Section-6 is about the India cloud scenario in education. Section-7 is about the 5 steps for integrated cloud management recommended by IDC. Section-8 is a case study on Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Finally section-9 is our observations & conclusion. II. APPLICATION OF CLOUD COMPUTING IN EDUCATION Cloud computing offers the educational institution the opportunity of concentrating more on teaching and research activities rather than on complex IT implementation. Many universities have already utilized the potential and efficiency of cloud computing in higher education. Among which we mention University of California, Washington State University’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, higher education institutions from UK, Africa, U.S and others. By utilizing the cloud services, North Carolina State University achieved substantially decreasing expenses of software licensing as well as reduced the campus IT staff from 15 to 3 employees with full working schedule [3]. Florida Atlantic University (FAU) is the first public university in southeastern Florida with intake capacity of more than 29,000 students from a main campus in Boca Raton and 6 other campuses across southern Florida. Students are offered more than 170 degree programs. The faculty researchers use more than 40 research centers and the university offers hundreds of cultural and educational events every year [4]. By virtualizing its data center using Hyper-V (a hypervisor based