Universities launch alternative for Dropbox
It’s not safe, the NSA has free access to sniff around and there are questions about the ownership of the data. Universities have different reasons to keep their employees from sharing data with cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. As an alternative, they now launch SURFdrive. Since last week, TiU’s employees can use this service.
Every user gets 100 MB storage space. Employees can share files with direct colleagues, but also with people from other universities. Corno Vromans, IT manager at LIS: “During a meeting in 2013, it turned out that most universities were searching for an alternative for Dropbox. We decided to tackle this problem together. You can share files with everybody who owns an e-mail address, but you can grant certain privileges to people who are known to the system”.
The Cloud server is located in a so-called sectorcloud, at a location that is only accessible for Higher Education staff. For a service like Dropbox, the server is in Amerika, where the NSA has the opportunity to interfere. Employees can log on with their university account. Because of the costs, the service won’t be available for students.
