Dropbox for staff - secure?

[imunro01]

I've been asked by a member of our SLT to add DropBox client to his PC. Obviously we've had a discussion about school data in the cloud etc, but I just wondered what you thought about how secure Dropbox is and ho well it is encrypted before I say yes or no.

 

Cheers.

[Mako]

The same demon reared its ugly head here, very recently in a "DropBox or SkyDrive" discussion. Without any concrete answer, we contacted our IT service support at our LA.

 

Their answer: DropBox doesn't comply with the Data Protection Act due to the location of their servers. SkyDrive is Microsoft, and has EU based servers for their cloud storage.

 

A more-or-less the same answer can be found in @GrumbleDook 's article about it:

EduGeek.net - Is DropBox ok to use?

 

Personally I'd steer clear of DropBox due to this relative unknown.

[GrumbleDook]

DropBox do meet the DPA as they have signed Safe Harbor and publish which Amazon farms they use, and the rest is risk assessment on whether the local laws out your data at risk. It is a similar argument for Google Apps for Education.

[AngryTechnician]

Am I the only one who gets frustrated with LA teams spouting out-of-date answers that can be debunked with a 10 second Google search?

 

Let me google that for you

 

Frankly, I think this sort of slapdash approach to policy making reflects incredibly badly on our profession.

[happymeal]

Would the data be secured/encrypted before firing over to Dropbox?

 

If we need to send something out by Dropbox/Secure FTP, we either zip it and password protect everything (zip and individual items), or encrypt it and fire it over - passwords/keys sent out by phone/email.

 

If it's secured/protected, then you *should* be ok...

[Marshall_IT]

When using Dropbox for my personal I use an app called cloudfogger. It encrypts and decrypts your data for you, have pc and Android clients, I assume it has mac and ios clients too.

 

But I would stick to educational offerings by the big players, i.e. Microsoft and Google.

[p858snake]

Would the data be secured/encrypted before firing over to Dropbox?

I know SpiderOak does this (just to chuck another service in the ring) but I believe all their servers are in the US.

[jmak]

I use an app called cloudfogger. It encrypts and decrypts your data for you, have pc and Android clients, I assume it has mac and ios clients too.

 

the iOS app allows read access to your cloudfogger files, but you can't create / edit cloudfogger files on the iDevices at the moment. It works nicely on Windows though - I have it set up as a library, within my Skydrive folder, so anything I want to be sure is confidential just gets saved in that directory and is automatically synched in secure format on my PC and on Skydrive.

 

I agree with @Marshall_IT though - I wouldn't use it for school / business

Edited March 6, 2013 by jmak
typo

[Sylv3r]

As a side note - where will you be syncing your dropbox data - I don't think it plays nicely with mapped drives - or it certainly didn't use too.