Information Services

Data Storage Policy

1. Purpose

The demand for digital storage has been increasing every year and vendors such as Google are responding to Colleges and Universities ever expanding use of disk storage. Google will no longer offer unlimited storage to Colleges or Universities. Connecticut College offers on-premise storage, but that too has limits and costs associated with it. This policy outlines the limitations for all college community members.

2.  Scope

This policy applies to all Connecticut College employees, including full and part-time staff, faculty, including adjunct and visiting, students and alumni, as well as affiliates, contractors, and volunteers who utilize or have access to Connecticut College digital storage resources. This policy defines limits for free available storage provided by Information Services. If more storage is needed than provided by this policy department funds can be used on a case-by-case basis to provide more storage through a cloud service.

3.  Definitions

Shared (formerly Team) Drive: You can use Shared Drives in Google Drive to store, search, and access files with a team. If members leave the team or leave the college the shared drive remains in place for continued access.

Disk Quota: Refers to the amount of space available to store files. Quotas are limits that are placed on the amount of storage a community member has access to. The current limit for the College as a whole with Google Workspace Education Plus licensing is 150TB.

Owner: The individual who is responsible for the use, sharing, and content of a shared drive space or on-premise department share. Also responsible for enforcing guidelines below. In many cases this will be an academic department chair, department head or data steward.

4. Policy

4.1 Google Shared Drive - Team or Department Limits

  • Provisioned Limits
    • General Purpose, student clubs/organizations or interdepartmental teams - 50GB
    • Department - 250GB
    • Academic Research - 500GB
    • Additional storage may be arranged for special purposes.
  • Deprovisioning
    • Shared drives that are Inactive with no active community member oversight for more than 3 years are subject to archiving, removal or transference.
    • If the content is inappropriate or is a copyright infringement, access can be suspended immediately and deleted after review.
  • Ownership/Management
    • Each Shared Drive must have at least one current community member (Faculty, Staff or Student) in the Manager role.
    • Ownership can be transferred to other share members
    • If no one takes ownership the account may be deprovisioned.

4.2 Google Workspace/Drive - Individual Limits

  • Provisioned Limits
    • Google workspace limits will be based on role as outlined below.
      • Alumni - 10GB (Note: Google free Gmail account allows for 15GB.)
      • Student - 15GB
      • Staff - 50GB
      • Faculty - 50GB
      • Retired Staff & Emeritus Faculty - 50GB
      • Additional storage may be arranged for special purposes.
    • Exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis through a Service Desk ticket. Once an individual is over the limit they can read (open) or delete files, but will be unable to add any new files until they remove files and get under the limit again. Community members that are already at or above the limit will be grandfathered; IS staff will work with owners to control growth.
  • Deprovisioning
    • Former employee accounts, both faculty and staff, are subject to deletion after 3 years except for Director-level and above administrator accounts that need to be preserved.
    • Retired staff after 15 years of service and emeritus faculty are entitled to keep their accounts, but are still subject to limits.
    • Alumni accounts not accessed for 3 years are subject to deletion. These accounts can be reinstated, but data will not be retained.
    • Students who do not graduate or withdraw are suspended immediately and subject to account deletion after 2 years. If they return to the college after the 2 years their accounts can be re-instated, but their data will not have been preserved.
  • Ownership
    • Can be transferred to another employee via a service desk ticket.
    • If no one takes ownership the account is subject to deprovisioning.
4.3 Kaltura

Kaltura is used to store and deliver streaming video. Users can use their college accounts to upload content. Departments have the option of using a departmental account. Videos stored in Kaltura can be viewed through Moodle for academic use, or through Media Space (media.conncoll.edu) for non-academic audiences. Permission from Curricular Technology (teachtech@conncoll.edu) is required to make videos accessible to the entire college community or to the public. Kaltura is not intended for use as an archival storage repository.

4.4 On-Premise Storage

On-campus file servers will be subject to storage limits. If a department file share is over the limit you will not be able to store any new data on the file share until data is removed or deleted.

  • Provisioning
    • Limit per departmental or interdepartmental share: 250GB
    • Exceptions will be considered via IT Service Desk ticket requests
  • Deprovisioning
    • Department data is managed by the departments.
    • Departments should follow their retention rules on how long data is preserved.
  • User account file storage will no longer be issued. Current user accounts data needs to be transferred to Google Drive.
  • Backups
    • Data backups are maintained for on-premise file shares and can be expensive.
    • It is recommended that archival data or video and pictures not be stored on these file shares.
4.5 Archival Storage

The College has limited resources for data retention and archival storage. Data is archived by Information services through the Special Collections & Archives department. Questions regarding retention should be directed to the college archivist.

4.5 Employee Computer Drive & Backups
  • Provisioning
    • The standard issue computer comes with a default size hard drive.
    • Departments can obtain larger sized drives for individuals, but will incur an additional fee.
  • Backups
    • The College provides for backup and recovery through a third party Saas solution that has a fixed storage size.
    • Departments may incur an additional charge if their employees require backup of more than the standard fixed storage size.
  • Deprovisioning
    • IS will assist with data transfer from old to new computer
    • Old drives are wiped completely before reselling.

5. Naming Conventions for Files

  • Naming Conventions - Users encouraged to be consistent with naming conventions so that system administrators know what the share is for, e.g., “Department-” name or if it’s two departments, their names and then something that describes the share. Examples include: “Biology-FacultySearch” or “ES_HR-Documentation.” 
  • Existing names can be grandfathered, but IS Staff may enforce changes to the file name based on storage quotas and when the shares are no longer in use.

References

Information Services Digital Data Classification Policy:
https://www.conncoll.edu/information-services/policies/digital-data-classification-policy/

Litigation Hold Policy:
https://www.conncoll.edu/information-services/policies/litigation-hold-policy/

Data Governance:
https://www.conncoll.edu/information-services/policies/information-services-data-governance-policy/

Storage Location Guidelines (ETS):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RmHJsUU7YyDTCeBOKSNeQgcR1hkPMg5m-atz83YR73A/edit?usp=sharing

Google Workspace site:
https://www.conncoll.edu/information-services/technology-services/g-suite-for-education-google-apps/

College Records Retention Policy:
https://www.conncoll.edu/media/new-media/life-after-cc/library-site/Records-Management-Program-Manual-2018.pdf

 

Effective Date

This policy and process is effective January 31, 2023