Google Workspace for Education backup and security should be taken seriously as GSFE (formerly known as Google Apps for Education) puts creative, nimble, and flexible learning at the center of the educational experience.
The global higher education system has expanded over the last 15 years in traditional and new markets. The ideas of equity, responsiveness, diversity, and institutional accessibility lie at the heart of this transformation process.
Knowledge production, dissemination, and curricula, building modern dynamic interaction between students and educators, between higher education and society are the most critical issues facing higher education today. Similarly, in the early 21st century, we see science, technology innovation, political and economic views becoming increasingly diverse.
In this article, we will guide you towards an extensive analysis and the most effective professional procedures to identify risks and provide detailed, actionable recommendations for mitigating campus cybersecurity risks and improving cyber threat protection with a strong focus on GSFE backup.
Table of Contents
What is Google Workspace for Education (GSFE)?
Google Workspace for Education is an innovative tool to enable new ways of learning and emboldens academic society to try new approaches to the education management process and enhance digital collaboration. Modes of knowledge delivery became utterly flexible, and many campus users depend on Google collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Vault, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites.
In the parallel universe, the cybercrime landscape is rapidly evolving, and higher education institutions are susceptible to cyberattacks, as the greatest weapons in the cybersecurity arms race increase.
Higher Ed IT professionals and leaders examine best practices to safeguard from cyberattacks, while cybercriminals demonstrate innovations in developing aggressive stealth strategies.
Contemporary campus IT systems are complex and interdependent. Higher Education institutions own responsibility for various types of protected data: personal, educational, medical, financial, copyright, and research.
The higher education culture, celebrating academic and research freedom, manifests such values as non-standardization, open flow of information, and highly collaborative cross-disciplinary teaching.
How to Ensure Google Workspace for Education Backup and Security?
To implement GFSE security procedures, campus IT authorities and Google Workspace administrators may require standard secure cloud platforms, policies, and practices, corresponding to the core values of academic community. Google Workspace is the most vibrant cloud solution to the above, ensuring security, privacy, availability, confidentiality, and data integrity. In the past years, Google’s long-term investment in productivity tools achieved broader higher education adoption, whilst more than 3M businesses now pay for Google Workspace. The top benefits of Google Workspace (former G Suite) for Education are:
- easy administration;
- collaboration and sharing tools;
- free Google Office suite;
- editing and versioning;
- synchronous communication;
- instant feedback;
- time-saving;
- confidence towards multiple devices;
- simple interfaces;
- accounts accessible from everywhere;
- large storage capacity;
- external security protection;
- free unlimited storage.
Google Workspace for Education (GSFE) is a cloud-based enterprise solution designated for teaching and learning collaboration. It enables content to be accessible anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Signing up with GSFE is free and simple, then your institution gains full administrative control over the domain account from an admin dashboard.
Why Google Workspace for Education Security is important?
Along with rich possibilities in the Google cloud-based environment, academic users and students can enjoy various Google security advantages, just like over 1 billion users worldwide. Google being greatly committed to cloud computing innovations is probably the most exposed company to threats, attacks, and malware infestation. This said, the GSFE users and Google Workspace admins will benefit from the same level of cybersecurity defense as Google. Consider all the regulations and compliance that vary worldwide, whereas GSFE meets all state requirements. To put it simply, it is undoubtedly more secure to keep your data in the Google cloud environment than “under your desk”.
However, your campus network is an open learning environment, where users are exposed to very traditional evolving threats, and the fierce enemy here is ransomware. While academic users can save time and effort uploading tons of documents, there is a huge threat that the encrypted files will immediately appear on the cloud. Let’s explore how your network might get infected.
Following the newest trends in malware protection, Spinbackup has recently launched Ransomware Protection for Google Drive, which enables educational institutions to detect attacks, block suspicious sources, identify damaged files, and automatically recover them. Security Alerts notify the Google Workspace Admin about the Ransomware Attacks.
If you trust Spinbackup to provide your data protection, the Restore-In-Time Machine service (Version control) will save infected users from headache, as the latest snapshot prior to attack will be restored in the same folder.
How to Deal with Potential Downsides
To strengthen your campus cybersecurity and preserve critical learning functions, we recommend you think of the two pillars of data protection.
Threat Intelligence
- Evaluate your current cybersecurity landscape.
- Map your internal, external, and contextual cybersecurity threats.
- Identify your most crucial risks (network, technologies, devices, vulnerabilities, exploits, and malicious intent or inadvertent action of insiders). Compile the list of prioritized cybersecurity incidents, considering your weakest links.
- Learn more on Google Workspace for Education, deploy GSFE back up and check on the privacy policy.
- Plan for addressing the prioritized threats. Build threat models and indicators, identifying malicious behavior.
- Set up Google Workspace security policies to the highest possible level and conduct regular security assessments in order to protect the sensitive data of the students.
- Consider cloud security services to avoid upfront capital expenditure to deploy security technologies. Discover more on Google Workspace Security.
- Think of deploying machine learning-powered cybersecurity solutions that can help your students and educators avoid being victimized by fraud or ransomware attacks.
- Offer campus end-users effective tools to control the email coming into their inbox, deal with inappropriate or malicious content (ex. phishing attempts to collect sensitive data).
On-Campus Cybersecurity Awareness Communication
- Promote the importance of strong cybersecurity culture to prevent the risk of becoming the victim of a cybercrime.
- Remind your colleagues that responsibility for data protection falls to them, as automatic sync changes are beyond the control of the cloud SaaS provider.
- Provide pieces of training as part of the orientation process for all campus students and staff to bridge the gap between current and desired security awareness.
- Broadly and continually communicate policies. Ensure academic staff and students understand and are ready to comply.
- Publicize incidents and cyberattacks within your institution. Communicate cyber threat and data loss prevention for Google Workspace.
- Discover new ways to measure the cybersecurity knowledge of campus staff.
- Provide comprehensive post-incident training, including requirements to disable network access and all wireless connections, unplug physical computers, turn off file and applications sync.
When evaluating data protection solutions, learn more on all-in-one GFSE security, Google Workspace backup, and cloud security solutions: Spinbackup solutions for Higher Education and see this page to try a 15-day free trial. Ensure you are fully protected with a GDPR compliant Google Workspace backup solution!
Read more on how to secure your Google Workspace and stay protected!