Mattawan Consolidated School

Compliance Monitoring and Control – In the cloud

The IT team at Mattawan Consolidated School selects CloudLock for visibility, compliance monitoring and control for staff and students

Mattawan Consolidated School is a growing school district just west of Kalamazoo and Portage, Michigan. Covering approximately 52 square miles, this family-oriented, education-minded community is attracting residents from the surrounding area and is becoming home to individuals and families new to the Kalamazoo area.

Mattawan Consolidated School’s students receive a rigorous academic experience within outstanding facilities. The four schools that comprise the school district provide core curriculum that exceeds the Michigan Department of Education requirements in all courses and integrates core state and national standards within the subject content.

The Problem

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With 400 staff and 4000+ students, the IT team at Mattawan Consolidated School is now tasked with maintaining the same level of controls for data stored in the cloud as it does with data stored on local file servers. Privacy and compliance continue to be the number one priority for the IT staff.

Enabling Google Apps for the school’s students allowed for effective collaboration without increasing IT expenditures. However, this also created a need to closely monitor students’ activities to make sure students continue to comply with the school’s code of conduct (i.e. no cyber bullying is happening).

The CloudLock Solution

After installing CloudLock for Google Apps on Mattawan’s staff domain, the IT team was able to find all the sensitive documents, review and correct sharing permissions, and make sure they comply with privacy regulations and best practices.

“Take for example all the IEP documents (Individual Education Plan),“ said Pete Poggione, IT Director for the four Mattawan schools. “The school owns hundreds of these documents and each one contains sensitive and private information about each student participating in this program. It’s key that we have the visibility and control to make sure these documents comply with privacy regulations.”

Poggione added “With CloudLock for Google Apps we regained the visibility and control of our documents and were able to audit all the documents and correct sharing permissions.”

Compliance with Privacy Regulations

Using CloudLock for Google Apps allowed Mattawan Consolidated Schools to comply with privacy regulations such as FERPA and CIPA. With CloudLock they were able to:

• Find sensitive documents and adjust sharing permissions
• Notify data owners of exposed documents containing potentially sensitive data
• List documents that do not comply with sharing best practices
• Change or revoke excessive rights as a domain admin
• Audit permissions changes performed by all domain admins with an audit trail
• Schedule reports to run automatically

“CloudLock for Google Apps provides us the ongoing monitoring and control we need to make sure our sensitive documents comply with privacy regulations. With CloudLock we are also able to change permissions without going through the end-users every single time. This is a big time saver for us,” said Poggione.

Re-gaining Visibility and Control

When using CloudLock for Google Apps we were able to see for the first time what sharing permissions we have on our documents and make sure we set the right controls in place“ said Poggione.

CloudLock for Google Apps is a Google Marketplace application built on the Google Apps Engine that provides key IT data management insights like:

• Users inventory – who is using Google Docs and what documents they own
• Data Inventory – how many documents exist and which types?
• Which documents are shared with the ‘public’ or Internet?
• Which documents are shared outside the organization?
• Which documents are shared with ‘Everyone’ within the domain?
• Who has access to what and what is accessible to whom?

“We first needed visibility and then control. CloudLock for Google Apps gave us both. With CloudLock we were able to audit all the documents of a specific user, change ownership of these documents and adjust the sharing permissions to match our policies.”

“As many other Google Apps for Education users, we considered the buy vs. build options. We looked into developing scripts that would provide us some of this functionality and after evaluating CloudLock for Google Apps we have decided to stick to our core competency: education, and purchased a product that does what we need and more.”

Monitoring Student Activities

Like most schools, Mattawan Consolidated School is subject to comply with ‘The Children’s Internet Protection Act’ (CIPA). This means that they are required to adopt and enforce a policy to monitor the online activities of minors.

“In addition to the school’s staff we have also enabled Google Apps for our students. With students, we face the challenge of making sure no bullying is going on. We are as committed to our code of conduct as much as we are committed to our academic excellence, and needed the ability to prevent inappropriate use of our Google Docs for bullying,” said Poggione.

CloudLock will soon release a feature that will enable admins to search a document’s content, allowing IT to search through student documents for inappropriate content without assuming ownership of these documents or changing the sharing permissions.

Protecting Data In the Cloud

For security conscious IT leaders leveraging Google Apps, CloudLock for Google Apps is the only cloud data protection solution that enables control of data while gaining the collaboration and cost savings benefits of Google Apps.

CloudLock’s for Google Apps is the only enterprise-class data protection application for Google Apps.