Notice Board

Personal vs Enterprise Cloud Services:

What is the difference between a personal cloud service and a University cloud service?

The personal cloud services that you sign up for (e.g. Google, DropBox, Yahoo) should be used for your personal business, whereas University business should be conducted using University provided (and supported) services, such as Microsoft O365. There are some important reasons for this, including your privacy, information and data security, and the University’s obligations under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

While the use of various applications on the internet may seem very similar, comparing the University’s enterprise services and the services you sign up for directly can highlight important differences between them.  

Why shouldn’t I use my personal accounts for University business?

The primary reason that students and staff need to utilize the enterprise services subscribed to by the University is privacy protection and data ownership. Through our negotiated contracts with vendors including Google and Microsoft, we are better positioned to protect the information uploaded to those services through University accounts.  Personal services such as Dropbox, personal Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, etc. do not offer these privacy and data protection guarantees, and often grant ownership or unlimited use of information to the company providing the service.

What is the risk?

A quick review of various privacy policies from cloud services show the risk you take by uploading your information to them.  For example, this excerpt from Facebook’s policy:

“Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with  our privacy and application settings)…. When you delete content, it’s no longer visible to other users, however it may continue to exist elsewhere on our systems”.

Or, this except from Google:

“We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like email you write and receive, photos and videos you save, docs and spreadsheets you create, and comments you make on YouTube videos.”

These types of statements don’t exist in our corporate contracts and our intellectual property and private information is protected from reuse and distribution to third parties.

What should I use my personal services for?

The cost of using many free internet services is giving the company rights to your personal information. You should use non-University services that you sign up or subscribe to (and not the University-provided services) for all of your personal business. However, you should become familiar with the terms and conditions of these services so that you can make informed decisions about what to use these services for. If you are aware of what you are giving up for the service, it is easier to determine whether or not it is a good fit for you. An important theme to remember when using internet services is to think about:

Do you pay for the service? If not, are you the customer or are you the product?

Things to consider:

• Take the time to read the privacy statements for each service you utilize.
• Review the material you’ve already uploaded to various services and take down information they shouldn’t have access to.
• Make sure to keep University information on University-supported services. OneDrive (employees only) or Google Drive (students and employees) is available to everyone on campus. Dropbox is not supported by the University so please review their privacy policy before loading anything into their services.
• You should not be forwarding email from your Uleth account to personal services such as Microsoft, Gmail or Yahoo.  Their contracts allow them to scan and retain the content of your email for targeted ad placements, or selling to third parties.
• If looking to subscribe to a new service for the University, ask the Privacy Office or the Information Security Office to help you understand the details.

For more information:

To get more information about the latest information security new affecting the University. Please visit the Information Security Office communication site at: https://uleth.sharepoint.com/sites/information-security-office