Accounts with up to 50 users are supported for free and beyond that, a fee is agreed on.

"The cloud makes it inexpensive and easy to collaborate and share information. In business, that means that even the smallest companies can now have as big a presence online as multinational corporation," added Taylor.

The universities are considered greater beneficiaries because of an existing World Bank grant in East Africa that supports bandwidth subsidy in univerities. The grant doubles the capacity that universities were buying so the institution pays half and the grant covers half the cost.

In Kenya, the Education Network received money to purchase 240MB of bandwidth that is being distributed to 60 colleges and universities in the country. The challenge is investing in training on how to handle spam and other online security threats that take up the university bandwidth.

"The best thing with Google cloud is that institutions don't have to invest in servers and techies; they can leverage on Google services," added Chege.