Cloud implementation is seen as a possible rescue measure to the financial crisis faced by higher education (HE) institutes due to the shrinking IT budgets and escalating IT needs. In this paper, architecture for implementing cloud in the HE institute involving various Deployment Models and Service Models is proposed. A five step framework based on Roger's Innovation-Diffusion model has been suggested for adopting cloud in HE institutes. For smoothing the migration from traditional system to cloud based system a five phase strategy is presented. Finally the challenges and benefits reaped by HE institute form cloud adoption are identified