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1. Introduction
The internet is evolving so quickly, from a traditional medium of merely providing information to users, to an indispensable requirement for the users who want to perform computing, store data and even run software applications at any given moment of time from any part of the world. This is possible with the advent of technologies such as "Cloud Computing (CC)". According to Khmelevsky and Voytenko (2010), CC is considered to be the fifth generation of computing after mainframe computing, personal computing, client-server computing and the web. Mell and Grance (2011) from National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), USA, defined CC as "a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction". They explained that it possess five essential characteristics (on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measure service), three service models (Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)) and four types of deployment models (private cloud (PRC), community cloud (COC), public cloud (PUC) and hybrid cloud (HYC)). Naturally, if an organization attempts to switch over to CC technology, then various decision such as "selecting a suitable service model", "selecting a suitable deployment model", "selecting suitable vendor providing CC technology", etc., are to be made. All these decisions are highly strategic in nature, as it would involve time and resources apart from changing the conventional way of operations. Hence, these decisions are of obvious importance. Unfortunately, these decisions are not given adequate importance in the educational sector, although attempts have been made to implement and use CC within various educational institutes across the world in recent times.
A review of literature (in the next section) shows that the level of CC adoption in the field of education - especially in the academic institutes and universities are minimal. Ercan (2010) too highlighted that the use of CC technology is more in the areas of finance and business (accounting for about 22 per cent), while it is very low in the education sector such as schools and education services (accounting for just 4 per...