Abstract:

In recent years, distance learning has gradually become a key element in the development of each university. In line with the concept of Lifelong Learning and the continuity of the learning process, distance learning platforms are one of the fundaments of the academic infrastructure, and their employability, functionality, scalability and fault-tolerance have already critical influence on the way, in which the higher education institutions manage to provide training appropriate to the needs of the new, knowledge-based economy. The introduction of modern and flexible forms of learning, enabling mobility, interactivity, universality and comprehensiveness, continually increases the requirements not only to the platforms but also – to the skills and work habits of the students and teachers working with them.

Modern training requires, on one hand, the availability of a sustainable and powerful ICT infrastructure and, on the other hand, sets qualitatively new requirements to the levels of support and competence of the responsible employees and technical maintenance specialists. Often, universities are unable to provide their own autonomous infrastructure (hardware, software, adequate bandwidth, etc.) and a corresponding level of understanding from local IT administrators needed to fully maintain all the components of the relevant distance learning platform. At the same time, the universities' needs for continuity and service flexibility are steadily increasing. Even with appropriate funding, it is impracticable to constantly purchase new software modules serving one or other component of the distance learning platform, as overall integration requires far-reaching hardware resources and integration efforts of the technical team, and often the capabilities of newly purchased components need to be upgraded again and again. The result is spending a lot of money and time without achieving the necessary quality and functionality, demotivating employees, students and lecturers and a failure of the university to adequately fulfill its core function - modern and quality training.

In search of a solution, we consider the possibility of partial integration of the services, provided by the public cloud, supported by some of the top world's IT providers and the private cloud of the university, which is linked to the distance learning platform. In this successful combination of private and public clouds, sometimes working in heterogeneous environment, we see the long-term perspective of the modern education in the uprising knowledge economy environment.

Keywords:

Hybrid cloud, private IT infrastructure, public cloud service, distance learning platform.