Going into the future, data privacy will be a major concern for many of the K-12 and higher education institutions. We’ve touched on the issue in this post, and the 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report has revealed the data collected from 86 countries. As it turned out, education remains almost as vulnerable as healthcare, with 99 of 382 registered incidents that resulted in the data disclosure.
The most popular attacks included web app errors, phishing emails, data privacy infringement, and ransomware.
While staying safe demands a huge effort from academic institutions, one cannot be 100 percent protected.
However, colleges and universities can minimize risks in several ways, including ensuring that each vendor:
- adheres to the local data regulations and data protection policies,
- implements server-side data encryption,
- provides secure data storage, and
- deletes all user data and files upon request, agreement expiry, etc.
At Unicheck, we take full responsibility for the privacy of the data shared by each school or university.
So far, we’ve brought Unicheck in compliance with GDPR, FERPA, and COPPA as well as the current EU and US regulations on data storage and processing. We are constantly increasing the security of our plagiarism checker to ensure that we are providing safe storage for academic databases and personal data of all students, IT staff, and faculty. How? With the Amazon cloud and the effort made by our dev team, architect, and CTO.
“Cloud technologies have hit the mainstream since they provide increased convenience to customers, allowing them to feel more secure with locally hosted data and the technical capacities that can be scaled at any time.”
We first announced our transition to AWS in June 2019, and today we’re happy to say that we’re opening two more data centers in Australia and Canada, on top of those launched in Europe and the U.S.
Here’s a quick recap on the benefits you’ll receive as a Unicheck partner:
- Data storage and processing as close to your university, college, or school as possible (for Australian institutions, it’s Australia, for Canadian ones, it’s Canada)
- Amazon’s high protection standards provide enhanced data privacy (over 85 standards supported, ISO27018 compliance, server-side encryption, and more)
- Quicker processing of user requests: AWS can be autoscaled during high demand seasons, so you won’t experience huge delays while scanning
- Increased uptime to 99.95% allows the plagiarism checker to be accessed day and night
Want to learn more about the benefits of hosting your data on AWS? Click this link or reach out to our Support Team via live chat or email support@unicheck.com.
