Curtin University has moved its email and collaboration apps to Microsoft’s Cloud, with students now having anywhere anytime access to university files thanks to the rollout.

Following a wave of migration to Cloud-based email systems for students and staff, Australian universities are preparing for the next migration trend, outsourcing instances of the popular Blackboard student resources portal to the vendor’s own servers.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.