Dr. Karuna P Joshi has been invited to be part of the EDUCAUSE working group on Total Cost of Ownership for Cloud Services (ECAR-TCO). The purpose of this group is to develop a flexible methodology for calculating a total cost of ownership for cloud-based services. This methodology can then be used to inform institutional strategies to offer, improve, or outsource IT services.

Project Description

Higher education has an increasingly rich set of cloud-based alternatives to campus-based IT services. Some of the most compelling reasons to move to the cloud are the promise of lower cost for like or better service levels, faster time to deployment, a greater business focus, and immediate scalability. Despite the vast promise of cloud technology, we lack a methodology to accurately and fully benchmark costs of today's campus-based services against cloud alternatives. Without this, institutions risk making potentially costly decisions that are difficult to undo, and either continue with a status quo approach or take a leap of faith into the cloud hoping the decision was the right one. ECAR-TCO builds on earlier efforts with the goal of developing a flexible methodology that can be applied by a variety of higher education institutions and customized to fit local environments.