It’s hard to believe, but we are only about six weeks away from the start of a brand new college semester. Sorry to be such a bummer to your Summer. But don’t worry students, this is geared more towards your professors and university faculty.
Think about the nearest college or university to you. Think about how many students go there. Now think about all the info needed about students. A data collection that big is really something. Managing backups on any campus is complicated by the need to offer a high-availability IT environment, while also allowing school employees to use their own devices (desktops, laptops, smartphones, etc.). All of this demands an expanded data volume that is quite massive. And of course, these services seem to only be noticed when things go haywire. Just like the old saying, “you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone”.
When files are NOT backed up, they run the risk of not being able to be restored in the event of major data breach. There goes all your lecture notes, documents, and class roster. How did this happen? The usual causes can be simple stuff like hardware, system failures. However, when it’s due to viruses and other nasty forms of malware, you are in for a real cyber fight.
Employees of any college or university have to decide on the data to be backed up. What data is essential to your day-to-day office or classroom life? You must take into consideration where you have the files stored on your computer. Look into which programs you use to create, edit, and save your files. When it comes to any programs that have been purchased, you want to ensure that you have the licenses and capability to re-install them.
The myth of data loss in the education system only being a student’s problem, needs to end. It’s more than just losing GPA records for a school. Can you imagine all the enraged students confronting their professors, because the school lost something they worked really hard on for an entire semester? Talk about the school of hard knocks.
