Since the Covid-19 pandemic swept the country, you may have noticed the line between home and the office is much more transparent. Personal laptops that were once used to watch cat videos and organize photos from a vacation (that now seems all-too-long-ago) are also being used to run sensitive reports and hold important meetings.
Ensuring that sensitive data doesn’t find a way to “leak” out of our closely-monitored network is a high priority for NMC. While there are many measures in place to ensure the confidentiality of data, such as using a VPN and enforcing special email quarantine policies, you are still our best defense against an information security incident or data privacy law violation whether you are working from home or on campus!
So, even though you can pet your dog, make a sandwich, wear your pajamas, AND process a FOAPAL, when you access data from NMC systems on your home network, treat the process the same way you would as if you were on campus! This means:
-
- Use Workspace to save files to the NMC network drives (S:, Q:, J:, and N:)
- Use Google Drive or Google Drive for Desktop
- DO NOT permanently save files to your personal desktop or “C” drive, which is the local storage on your computer.
- If something happens to these files the recovery process is not guaranteed and NMC is not responsible for devices that are not our own.
- Because of this, you risk exposing sensitive information by saving files on a network outside of our control.
🚨 👉Special care must be taken with Banner data on your home machine. While working remotely, you may temporarily download it to your machine but once you are finished working on it for the day, save it to a network or Google Drive and ERASE all of the data from your machine. The data that you work with in Banner is classified and protected by FERPA regulations and therefore cannot be saved to a personal computer.
So remember, whether on campus or remote, save your data and files to the appropriate locations. For remote access users, this means utilizing Workspace to access our Network Drives such as S:, Q:, J:, N:, and using Google Drive/Google Drive for Desktop for other NMC-related file management.
For more information on using Workspace see the Workspace Tip Sheet
For more information on using Google Drive see the Google Drive Tip Sheet
For more information on Google Drive for Desktop see the Google Drive for Desktop Tip Sheet