There are lot of research works carried out in the field of Information Technology (IT), which have more impact on the education throughout the world. The main contribution from IT in today's education world is e-learning. There are several institutions implemented the mechanism and several technologies of e-learning in different countries. E-learning provides more flexibility in education. Although there are several organizations and institutions had come up with the e-learning system, the cost of investment involved for the infrastructure setup is much higher for e-learning applications. Cloud Computing is one of the important technology, which provides different services, which plays a vital role in the education domain and e-learning mechanism. In addition, the security factor in sharing the content is also much important nowadays as the content is shared among different countries with multiple source environments. In this paper, cloud-based e-learning is implemented using access control mechanism, which prevents the cloud resources from illegal user access. The key management schemes combined with access control technique is discussed for secure content sharing and to protect the e-learning environment. The traditional e-learning mechanism is compared with the cloud e-learning for the better understanding of the cloud usage and advantages. Findings indicate that cloud-based e-learning utilizes cloud services in a secure way and also more flexible and scalable in accessing the e-learning content. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.