CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background  of the Study

Generally it is known that in our knowledge and technology-driven global village, each country’s economic and social well-being depends on its ability to harness its human resources through a dynamic and innovative educational system that thrives on and propels technological development. This required link between educational and technological development is particularly critical at the higher levels of the educational system, and especially, university education. Internet connectivity and various forms of web-enabled technologies are growing exponentially, and more and more information is becoming available on-line, thereby opening up new information research and networking opportunities. These developments are erasing the traditional borders and boundaries of learning, and leading to radical changes in the activities of scholarly communities. Modern university education now depends on a robust programme of automated information services to support and facilitate teaching, learning, research and management. This scenario of accelerated technological change poses new challenges and opportunities for universities, and Nigerian universities must re-position themselves quickly and continuously to exploit prevailing information technologies to efficiently meet their teaching, learning and research mission. This research work is therefore centered on cloud computing which is an unexplored technology most especially in the Education. Cloud computing is a recent concept that is still evolving across the information technology industry and academia. Several definitions have evolved so far, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Mell and Grance, 2011), defines cloud computing as “a model for enabling 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 ˮ. There are three major types of cloud computing services: First, Processing Clouds that provide scalable and mostly affordable computing resources that run enterprise programs, which is also sometimes known as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Secondly,  Storage Clouds that offer an alternative to local file systems also known as  Platform as a Service (PaaS), and thirdly, Application Clouds that allow a thin client to interact with services that are completely hosted on an external infrastructure also called Software as a Service (SaaS) (Ajith and Hemalatha, 2012).

The basic principle of cloud computing entails the reduction of in-house data centres and the delegation of a portion or all of the Information Technology infrastructure capability to a third party. This holds the promise of driving down cost while fostering innovation and promoting educational development. Institutions of higher learning, such as Universities and Colleges, are the core of innovation through their advanced research and development. Subsequently, higher Institutions may benefit greatly by exploiting the power of cloud computing, including cost cutting as well as all the above types of cloud services (Goetzinger, 1962). This research work presents a frame work for implementing necessary security and integrity of result computation in cloud computing environment in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Mathematically, a result is a quantity or expression obtained by calculation after an examination while result computation is a mathematical process or calculation involving numbers or quantities obtained from the outcome of an examination based on institutional rules guiding result computation. Nigerian Universities are facing problems in providing necessary Information Technology (IT) support for educational, research and development activities. Every year, lots of data are collected, used and stored in Nigerian Universities, such as student’s personal information, admission details, courses offered, examination scores, etc. These data increases every year as the number of students increases and must be made available or accessible, even many years after completion of a programme from a University which could span for a minimum of four years. These large volume of data requires lots of storage and computing resources such as speed, storage memory, efficiency, etc.

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