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Cloud computing technologies play a substantial role in public organizations and private sector companies since it reduces the cost of using information technology services and allows users to access the service anytime and everywhere, whilst only paying for what they use. In developing countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the cloud computing is still not widely adopted, compared to countries in the west. In order to promote the adoption of cloud computing, it is important to recognize that an important and specific issue related to cloud computing is the potential and perceived security risks posed by implementing such technology. Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate the security risk factors that influence organization to adopt cloud computing in a Saudi Arabia context. This research proposed a framework for the successful adoption of cloud computing, focused on risks when implementing security in the cloud system.

Nowadays, Universities have become more reliant on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to provide educational services for their stakeholders. While most of the Universities in Europe and North America has harnessed the capabilities of cloud services to provide large scale flexibly electronic educational services. In Saudi Arabia, most of the Universities are start-ups with limited IT Staff and ICT infrastructure. Therefore, migrating their ICT services to cloud computing could deliver substantial benefits in the form of rich education content, increased efficiency, and agility that can be used to transform higher education in Saudi universities. However, to successfully migrate to the cloud in the Saudi universities context, it is essential to identify the enabler factors that contribute toward a successful migration to the cloud environment in the higher education settings. Therefore, this research paper proposes a framework to investigate technological and organizational success factors that enable the migration process of the Saudi Universities’ ICT to the cloud environment.

Information Technology (IT) plays an important role in enabling education services be delivered to users. Most education online services in universities have been run on the cloud to provide services to support students, lecturers, researchers and administration staff. These are enabled with the emergence of cloud computing in the world of IT. Cloud computing offers on demand Internet-based computing services. This paper presents an overview of cloud computing adoption in higher education, mainly tertiary institutions and universities. The focus of the paper is the challenges of cloud computing in higher education. It introduces the background to cloud computing and reviews research on adoption challenges in higher education institutions. These challenges are important as they provide an overview of the adoption of cloud in higher education. The authors proposed an integrated reference model based on the challenges in the literature integrated with TAM model to investigate the factors influence the users’ attitudes and behaviors toward using cloud education services in universities ICT provision.