ETEC 522 – September 2012

Before looking at this week’s presentation, I was thinking that Cloud computing will widen the gap of the digital divide. After educating myself I came to realize that actually, it doesn’t. It will help remove the digital divide. Instead of investing heavily in infrastructure and purchasing physical servers, software, data center storages, or network equipments, schools buy these resources as fully outsourced services, as we called it Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). We can outsource all the services to giant companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. The IaaS enables the delivery of computer infrastructures as a service via the Internet.

In most developing countries, investing in infrastructure is a big barrier for them because it costs a lot of money and also the technology advances so quickly that by the time they finish building their infrastructure, the technology changes. So they need to spend again for updates or upgrades. Obviously cloud computing requires good bandwidth and high speed internet. However, I have heard that they require less speed and bandwidth because all storage and media data stay in the cloud computer. So the future potential of cloud computing is to reduce the digital divide at least in the developing countries.