Over the 2020 summer break, DIT Vice President Jeff Hollingsworth sent out a guideline to the campus community:

“Conduct university business using your university email account. Institutional data such as FERPA-protected student information cannot be stored on or sent to/from your privately owned computer or email account. Do not forward your umd.edu email to a personal account such as Gmail. If you need to work with FERPA-protected student data or other sensitive information at home and lack a UMD issued computer, contact your department IT staff about remote desktop services.”

This article will provide you with the reference material necessary to conduct university business while adhering to this guideline.

ECON IT staff has spoken with DIT about the nature of the UMD virtual environment, and they have noted that while these virtual machines are available for use they are also considered volatile storage. What this means is that any data stored locally on these desktops are liable to be wiped at any time, meaning that you can potentially lose any work you may have done.

In order to preserve these files for use between sessions, you will need to link your UMD cloud storage accounts with these virtual machines using Kumo.

For data security and ease of use, ECON IT recommends using the Google Drive account associated with your UMD Gmail account. DIT has stated that Google Drive is acceptable for use for up to “Category 3” classified data, which includes FERPA-protected data such as student records. For more information about UMD data classification standards, please read the DIT documentation on data classification.

To connect these accounts, do the following:

1. Go to the Kumo website and click the green “Log In” button.
2. Log in to CAS using your UMD directory ID and password.
3. After logging in, you will see a list of compatible cloud services. Click “Google Drive”, which will open a drop-down menu.
4. Click “Authorize” in the drop-down menu, which will open a Google sign-in window.
5. Enter your @umd.edu email address and click “Next”. This will bring up an authorization window asking if you allow TerpDrives access to your Google account, along with a list of permissions it is requesting.
6. Click “Allow”, and you will be brought back to the main Kumo page. If successful, you should see a green check next to the Google Drive entry in the list.

Now that you have successfully connected your Google Drive account to Kumo, you will see your online drive available as a drive within the VM, similar to our ECON network drives.

The UMD Virtual Desktop System was made available in March 2020 for all members of the university. This includes students, staff, and faculty. With this virtual environment, you will be able to work with sensitive data without risk of exposing it to potential theft.

To connect to the UMD Virtual Workspace environment, please follow the directions DIT has provided on their knowledgebase.

NOTE: This function is currently being tested. Will update as more information is available.

Due to the nature of how the UMD virtual desktop works, if you wish to use the ECON departmental printers you will need to manually add them to your session when logging in. To do so, follow the directions on our network printers article on the wiki.