How EDUCAUSE Can Help Your College Get a Better Grip on the Cloud

Some administrators think that servers other than the Cloud would provide safer storage options for their college’s data.

Greg Harp, Media Representative at LoudCloud says this is not entirely true.

“I think one of the misnomers is somehow the Cloud is more connected to a hosted network solution or FIS,” he says. “The fact of the matter is, if someone is trying to hack something, whether it’s on the university’s network or it’s hosted in the Cloud, the vulnerability is really the same. The Cloud is not the variable there, it’s the security systems that they’ve put in place.”

Manoj Kutty, CEO of LoudCloud says this is where colleges’ security measures need to step up.

He says college Cloud-users should focus their security-questions on three major points:

Reliability

“I think most institutions focus on reliability,” Kutty says. “For example: there’s an examination tomorrow. Is the vendor’s Cloud-based instance going to be up and running? Do those students and faculty members have access to the applications at all times? How reliable is it?”

Scalability

“You might have a university of 1,000 students, but is this technology application able to support thousands of students, 50,000 students or 100,000 students?” he says.

Data Recovery

“What happens if your application goes down?” Kutty says. “Does this mean you will lose data? Is your data secure? Can you replicate the data that’s lost?”

Al-Abdulla says colleges can also pair up with a Cloud service provider to boost its data security.

He says once these partnerships are formed and Kutty’s points are addressed, Cloud security can increase on a college campus.

“In a lot of cases, the Cloud service providers have a very scalable infrastructure, and that includes a very scalable security expense,” he says “It’s not at all uncommon for some of the larger Cloud providers to have much more robust security infrastructures, security staff, processes and procedures, than any individual college would be able to support. In some cases those Cloud servicers can have measurably more secure environments and the risk of data in those servicers is lower.”