"at the mercy of somebody else’s support infrastructure": Navigating the Cloudscapes of Higher Education

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 analyzed 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.