As there is a growing trend of hackers attacking higher education institutions in the US, these organizations are focusing on securing their data in order to avoid breaches of information.
Many of them are choosing external solutions to increase and to improve their security parameters. In fact, The Cornell University explains that “colleges and universities across the country (if not the world) are moving away from in-house infrastructures that transmit and store information to ‘cloud’ services that hold and process institutional information outside of the institution’s technical infrastructure… and control”.
In this way, these institutions face threats that are becoming more diverse. According to Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR), “in higher education, the largest proportion of the reported breaches fall into the hacking/malware classification (36%). These are breaches where an outside party accessed records via direct entry, malware or spyware. 30% of the reported breaches were the result of an unintended disclosure, where sensitive information was inadvertently made publicly available on a website or sent to an unintended recipient via e-mail or fax. 17% of the reported breaches were due to the loss of a portable device, such as a lost or stolen laptop or memory device.”
Now, experts and experience shows that one of the main advantages of cloud computing applied to higher education security is that it offers a different location where valuable information is stored, and this external location contains stronger security systems, better than many colleges and universities can finance.
Besides that, Richard Katz, Phil Goldstein and Ron Yanosky, from Educause, underline that this technology contributes to higher education management in other several ways: “Driving down the capital and total costs of IT in higher education; facilitating the transparent matching of IT demand, costs, and funding, scaling IT, fostering further IT standardization, accelerating time to market by reducing IT supply bottlenecks, creating a pathway to a five nines and 24 × 7 × 365 environment, enabling the sourcing of cycles and storage powered by renewable energy, and increasing interoperability between disjoint technologies between and within institutions,” among others.
Experiences in colleges already have shown good results, in terms of higher education management indicators. According to EdTech, 55% increased efficiency, 49% improved employee mobility, 32% increased the ability to innovate, 31% freed current IT staff for other projects and 25% reduced their operating costs.
Is your organization already working with cloud computing services? Please, let us know your experience.
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