Secure data storage at Yale

How you should store data depends on the nature of your data, and the degree of security required to protect your data against unauthorized access or accidental loss. Data security is about more than just confidentiality — even if you don't deal with sensitive information, your data may be crucial to University business continuity, and you should protect it against technical problems or hardware theft.

General considerations:

• Know what data you have, and how to appropriately classify the security level required.
• Perform a data self-scan if you haven't already, and discuss your data storage requirements with your supervisor.
• Use Yale's centralized network backup service to protect against data loss.
• Whenever possible, store your data on one of Yale's centralized file storage services. This protects your work against accidental loss or theft, and against unauthorized access to your data.

Recommendations for secure storage of data:

• 1-Lock data can reside on your desktop computer, laptop computer, smartphone, or other local or portable device. Although confidentiality is not the primary concern, 1-Lock data may be very important to the continuity of University business. 1-Lock data should always be backed up using Yale's centralized and automated Backup Service.
• 2-Lock data should primarily reside on Yale's centralized file storage services, unless important and temporary circumstances warrant short-term storage on local office computers, laptops, or smartphones. 2-Lock data on local devices should always be protected by a password or local encryption, with explicit authorization from your supervisor.
• 3-Lock data should always be stored on Yale's centralized file storage services, and should never reside on a local computer, laptop, or smartphone.
• Data encryption is a powerful and very useful security technology that should only be used in close consultation with your supervisor, and your computing support provider. More on data encryption...

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Related topics

• ITS file storage options
• Data encryption
• ITS Backup Services
• Data self-scanning
• Levels of data security at Yale

Related University Policies & Procedures

• Yale policies on data security and access
• Policy 1610 - Systems and Network Security
• Procedure 1610 - Systems and Network Security