Student expectations around learning have fundamentally shifted. A survey of students enrolled in online programs found that 63 percent chose online learning for its flexibility, allowing them to study anytime, anywhere, while balancing work and personal responsibilities. This shift reflects how learners now define value in a cloud-based learning system.
Students no longer see learning as something tied to fixed schedules or physical labs. They expect access on their own terms and through the devices they already use every day. For university leadership, this creates a clear challenge. Traditional physical lab models struggle to meet these expectations, especially when programs are expected to scale without increasing infrastructure costs and management overhead.
This is where a modern hands-on learning platform becomes essential. Turning out to be a top choice for leading institutions, enabling them to expand beyond campus boundaries and keep up with changing academic requirements. CloudLabs, as a hands-on learning platform, helps universities respond to changing student expectations by providing fully managed virtual labs with built-in instructor controls, enabling seamless learning experiences. Continue reading the blog to understand CloudLabs’ role in redefining learning goals for K-12 and higher education institutions, removing the need for physical labs and manual management.
Why Are Physical Labs Reaching Their Limits?
While physical labs have long supported hands-on learning, they are increasingly misaligned with the scale, flexibility, and speed modern education demands.
Scaling is Slow and Expensive
Adding seats in a physical lab usually means new machines, imaging, licensing, and support hours. Even when demand spikes for a single course or certification track, capacity stays fixed. For institutions managing multiple programs across departments, physical labs can become a patchwork of underutilized rooms and overbooked peak times.
Restricted Access by Location and Time
Physical labs tend to serve students who can be on campus during specific hours. That creates equity gaps among commuter students, working learners, part-time cohorts, and students at global or satellite campuses.
Curriculum Update Becomes Operationally Heavy
Modern curricula change fast. Cloud services update weekly, cybersecurity threats evolve daily, and data tools iterate constantly. When every course refresh triggers lab rebuilds and manual configuration, innovation slows down.
Advantages of Virtual Labs for Education
| Strategic Focus Area | What It Enables | Impact |
| Expand Access Without Expanding Infrastructure | Learners can access labs on demand from any location and on any device of their choice, without waiting for physical lab availability. | Increased learner reach, improved equity, and higher utilization without new infrastructure investments. |
| Reduce Operational Friction for IT and Faculty | Lab setup, resets, and environment consistency are taken care of by the CloudLabs team. | Lower IT workload, fewer support tickets, and more faculty time focused on teaching. |
| Support Global and Modern Program Delivery | Secure hands-on labs for hybrid programs, global cohorts, and continuing education. | Faster program expansion, easier collaboration, and scalable delivery across regions. |
| Build a Foundation for Future-Ready Learning | Cloud-based labs support evolving curricula and scalable digital education models. | Aligns with a fast-growing digital education market, enabling long-term readiness. |
Key Roles of a Cloud-based Hands-on Learning Platform
As per leading educational institutions prefer a modern virtual lab platform that should enable:
Standardized Lab Experiences Across Courses and Cohorts
Every learner gets the same environment, the same starting state, and the same tasks, whether they are in the library, at home, or in another country.
Fast Spin-up and Clean Reset
Labs should launch in minutes and reset on the go. This protects the student experience from “I broke my lab” moments and protects faculty time from troubleshooting marathons.
Support For Existing Learning Tools
Programs need environments that reflect industry, including major cloud providers, OS variations, and common security or dev toolchains.
Governance, Security, and Cost Controls
Institutional heads need confidence that student labs are isolated, auditable, and compliant with institutional policies. They also need predictable spend and visibility into usage.
Insight Into Learning Outcomes
Completion rates, time-on-task, and common failure points help faculty improve labs and help leadership understand ROI.
How CloudLabs as a Hands-on Learning Platform Supports Seamless Education Without Physical Labs
Top institutions trust CloudLabs as a hands-on learning platform to deliver guided learning experiences through fully managed virtual labs without the physical overhead. Students can access these labs from their own devices, while instructors have complete control and visibility into each learner’s lab progress. Instead of building and maintaining physical labs, institutions can provide cloud-based education that supports practical learning at scale across global campuses, without any time constraints.
Extensive Faculty Experience
- Extensive Lab Catalog: Instructors get to choose from 200+ pre-built labs or customize environments that match their specific course and curriculum needs.
- Seamless LTI Integration: Deploy labs directly into existing LMS platforms, like Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, or MS Teams, over LTI 1.1 and 1.2.
- Multi-Cloud Compatibility: Deploy labs on the cloud of choice – AWS, Azure, and GCP, or bring your own cloud space.
- Real-time Instructor View into Every Student VM: Instructors get to monitor each learner’s screen and share resolutions when needed.
- Persistent Labs: Let your students continue and keep the same VM for the entire course, with all work being saved between sessions.
- Non-Persistent Labs: Explore time-bound labs that reset automatically, enabling a seamless experience with exams, hackathons, and fairness in assessments.
Advanced Cost Controls
Leading institutions have reported up to 80% savings in lab costs:
- Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model: CloudLabs only charges for active lab environments. No extra pay, zero hidden charges.
- Monitor Cost Reports: Power BI-backed, detailed reports with a dashboard view ensure accurate insights into lab deployments, helping analyze and monitor associated costs.
- Scheduled Limits: Set auto lab deletion dates, configure credit limits, and enable detection of unused lab resources to prevent unexpected expenses.
- Enable Lab Auto Deletion: Schedule lab instances to get automatically deleted after a fixed number of days.
- Custom VM SKUs and Disk Options: Balance performance and cost by choosing the right VM type – GPU, HDD, or SSD.
- Run Labs in Your Own Azure Subscription: When using CloudLabs VM Labs for education, maintain data ownership, meet compliance needs, and align with institutional policies by running your own Azure Subscription.
Seamless Learning Experience for Students
- Pre-built Windows and Linux Labs Available Over Browser: Labs are available on the web browser of choice, with zero installs and no setup needed. Students begin learning immediately.
- Inbuilt Lab Guides: Inbuilt lab guides available with step-by-step instructions, enables seamless learning experience for each student.
- Industry Accredited Security Compliance: Active compliance with GDPR, SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, and other security policies ensures the complete safety of data and information.
- 24/7 Premium Support: Experienced professionals provide 24/7 support, resolving lab-related queries without additional overwork for the IT department.
CloudLabs Supporting BYOD Trend
Bring Your Own Device has become the standard across education, not an exception. Most students already arrive with capable laptops and expect learning to work seamlessly across their own devices, locations, and schedules. Institutions are responding by shifting toward hands-on learning platforms that support this reality without forcing students or faculty to manage complex setups.
However, BYOD introduces real challenges. Asking students to use personal devices without a managed environment creates security risks, inconsistent experiences, and uneven learning outcomes. At the same time, issuing and maintaining institution-owned devices for every learner is costly, operationally heavy, and difficult to scale.
Virtual labs designed for BYOD solve this problem by changing the institution’s role. Instead of providing every machine, universities provide the environment. Students use their own devices, while the lab itself runs securely in the cloud.
CloudLabs supports the BYOD model through fully managed virtual labs that launch directly in the browser. Students access fully managed labs without installations, while faculty and IT teams retain full control over security, access, and configurations. With automated lab provisioning, guided experiences, and built-in governance, CloudLabs ensures hands-on learning remains secure, scalable, and instructor-led, not improvised by students.
Wrapping Up
The conversation about virtual labs is often framed as an IT decision. In reality, it is an academic and institutional performance decision.
For academic leaders, virtual labs improve consistency and increase hands-on practice opportunities without adding timetable constraints. For technology leaders, they reduce the burden of maintaining physical lab fleets and enable centralized governance. For university leadership, they expand program capacity, strengthen outcomes, and support new revenue opportunities through certifications, workforce training, and global online delivery.
Physical labs will still matter for certain disciplines. But for cloud, software, cybersecurity, and many digital-first programs, the scalable model is clear.
If your goal is to increase hands-on learning while keeping infrastructure practical, CloudLabs helps you deliver virtual labs for education that are accessible, secure, and built for modern students, without the limits of physical labs. Planning to make a shift? Book a 1:1 conversation with our expert for a comprehensive overview of the path ahead.
Harshal Charde is an accomplished Principal Cloud Solution Architect at Spektra Systems, with extensive expertise in Microsoft Technologies, Hyper-V, Cloud Computing, and Virtualization. His proficiency in these areas allows him to design and implement cutting-edge solutions for clients, driving business growth and innovation.
