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

How to Equip Your Educators with More Security Armor

Decide where your information will be hosted

Kutty says colleges can store information in multiple locations in addition to the Cloud, especially if they are using software solutions for storage.

He says LoudCloud stores its applications on BlankSpace, but its data recovery goes to Amazon. That way, if one company has problems, he can rely on the other to access his data.

“If you just host it in one city, then that city could suffer an electrical outage for example…even institutions like Blankspace offer the ability to host your same software in multiple mirrored instances,” Kutty says. “They might host it in San Antonio, they might host it in Chicago, they might host it in Raleigh. What we do is we host it in a couple of different places with Blankspace, but we also host it with Amazon as a backup. For institutions it is important. It’s not just being in the Cloud, but [other places too.]”

Tighten identity management

Al-Abdulla says the strength of a college’s security measures can be determined is through the strength of users’ passwords.

“That whole concept of identity management, the creation, deletion and management of accounts has been a challenge that folks have been struggling with for 20, 30 years inside their network,” he says. “Whatever those identity management processes are, they need to be extended to include Cloud services. ”

Check out your local laws

Al-Abdulla says that different states have different laws and regulations about how to handle data breaches.

He says that certain state regulations can map back to identify the information that was breached, what the impact of the breach was, and what other access the hackers might have to other information.

“Doing the analysis of the breach, doing the tracking of what information was at risk and what other access could be gained are the first critical steps,” Al-Abdulla says. “At a regulatory obligation level, sometimes penalties have to be addressed. In many cases, the individual whose information was lost has to be notified.”

Make sure IT is up to speed

Kutty says IT administrators rarely ask questions about application reliability, or if it will be securely hosted at their college.

He says that needs to change if IT is to play an important role in Cloud security.

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