Are There Student Safety Concerns in Your Archive?

I’ve written in the past about the reasons why you should archive email, documents and files using a third-party solution. Similarly, there are strong reasons to no longer use your on-site archiving solution and turn to a cloud-based archiving vendor for your school or district.

A lot of what we’ve talked about focused on security concerns as well as common use cases, for instance, compromised accounts or content that someone deleted accidentally.

Another topic that I want you to consider is student safety. Whether it’s content referencing self-harm, or photos—some of which may be inappropriate—that become part of your archive when students sync their phones to their Google or Office 365 accounts, there likely will come a time when you'll want to remove student content from your archive.

A student might include a social security number, personally identifiable information or health information, albeit without malicious intent. Think about it. In those instances, what are you doing/going to do?

Without a third-party archiving solution, it will be difficult to remove content related to the safety and well being of your students. Your retention rules and litigation hold policies—whether at the organizational unit (OU) level or by the user—will make it virtually impossible to remove this unwanted content.

When necessary, we’ll treat student content and staff content differently. Our Safety Management customers get a minimum 30-day archive of student content along with incredible customer support. And when asked to remove archived student content that could impact their safety, privacy or well being, we make it a priority to work with our customers to purge potentially compromising content.