Over the summer, 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.

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.

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.

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 and store any sensitive data without risk of potentially exposing it to potential theft.