Rural ICT Development (RICTD) International Conference 2013, Malacca, MALAYSIA, 25 - 27 Jun 2013

Cloud Powered Rural Telecenters A Model for Sustainable Telecenters

Osman Ghazali1, Baharudin Osman1, Azizah Ahmad1, Azizi Abas1, Abdul Razak Rahmat1, Mohamed Firdhous1,2, 1 ITU-UUM ASP CoE for Rural ICT Development, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia. {osman, bahaosman, azie, azizia, arazak }@uum.edu.my, mfirdhous@internetworks.my
2

Faculty of information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka Mohamed.Firdhous@uom.lk

Abstract ICT has been identified as the great equalizer that can successfully bridge the gap between rural and urban population. Almost all the governments with the aid of national and international organizations are engaged in implementing rural ICT projects. Telecenters is a common feature of all the rural ICT development projects. The telecenters provide the common place for intended users to access the services provided by these projects. Telecenters all over the world are faced with sustainability issues due to lack of financing and qualified human resources to man them. In this paper, we propose a cloud rural telecenters that effectively reduces the financing and human resources required to run telecenters. The paper also discusses in detail how the proposed model would increase sustainability of telecenters. Keywords: Cloud Computing, Rural ICT, Telecenter