(1) Ensuring student data/information confidentiality — Student applications and student affairs have to be cognizant of regulations like FERPA. Especially when handling cases about special student situations, sensitive personal and educational matters. Cloud-based platforms like Google Drive are great for ease of sharing student data between counselors and student advisors and deans. However, ensuring that this data is not lost or gets into the wrong hands is very important. Being able to encrypt such files and revoke access or prevent over-sharing is critical. GC can enable all of these.
Additionally, most large universities have foreign students, visiting researchers, and faculties. Ensuring foreign student personal data privacy is an additional concern they have to be extra cautious about. For instance, GDPR compliance (and also regional privacy regulations like CCPA) has put an additional burden on educational institutions. Again, these are some areas that GC can help significantly,
(2) Safeguarding IP while promoting collaboration between researchers — Students and faculty are increasingly using cloud-based tools to collaborate on research. They are using Google Docs like online collaboration tools today. However, maintaining the confidentiality of these documents is extremely difficult over time. So, features like Google Workspace CSE (Client-side encryption) will allow them to create encrypted documents and ensure that only a limited set of people will have access to these.
The university needs to ensure the long-term protection and security of such IP beyond the tenure of the students and/faculty. GC can help with all of this. Again, like in the data migration/company merger use-case, ownership and transfer of data may need to happen at certain times. And encryption provides that extra layer of security and integrity that is highly desirable in such situations.
