How can universities power the student experiences of the future?
The modern student experience is dependent on digital services. Teaching and learning are being maintained thanks to cloud services. But universities are putting themselves at serious risk if they don’t have reliable and robust backup and disaster recovery measures in place. With no fallback if these services become unavailable, the offering for both students and staff is severely compromised. The responses to our FOI request actually show that universities are fairly confident in their data security measures. Almost all respondents (97%) report responsibility for storing sensitive data, with the vast majority using some form of cloud computing (96%) or online storage like Microsoft Office 365 (92%). Additionally,88% maintain a digital backup of their data, demonstrating that they do understand the risks of data loss. But it’s one thing having accurate cloud backups in place, and another matter entirely to be able to make use of it quickly should the worst occur. Only 67% of universities have a formal process in place to respond to outage incidents. Investment is important, but good disaster and backup capabilities are equally about behavior, process and practice. There are several questions universities should always be asking themselves when it comes to their IT strategy. How important is their data to their day-to-day business? What are the financial and reputational implications if they were to lose all their data – even temporarily? IT systems are now vital for almost all university operations. Backup, then, must be taken seriously, using approaches like the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies of data, across two different types of media, with one copy kept off-site, is a well-known rule of thumb here. But without also regularly stress-testing systems and fire-drilling IT teams to test their response, the fallout from a serious incident could become a real risk.
