Abstract
In recent years Saudi Arabia has made great strides in higher education. This paper looks at the higher education sector in Saudi Arabia with special emphasis on outsourcing to Software as a Service based email systems as a positive enabler of higher education. Outsourcing can be defined as the process of contracting services to a third party with financial and contractual terms to govern that provision. There are many advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing and many reasons why an organization might decide to outsource specific services. This chapter describes the information systems outsourcing trend towards cloud based solutions (particularly email) in the Saudi Arabian higher education sector over the last few years and discusses the implications of this trend.