Financial Aid Data & Storage Devices

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) requires financial institutions – companies that offer consumers financial products or services like loans, financial or investment advice, or insurance – to explain their information-sharing practices to their customers and to safeguard sensitive data.

Due to GLBA regulations, the storage and transfer of financial aid data on portable storage devices such as external hard drives and thumb drives is not permitted. Storage and sharing of financial aid data should be done through approved services such as OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint. 

Please exercise good judgement when sharing sensitive data of this type, limiting access to only those who have a legitimate business reason to engage with this data. Do not use the “share with everyone in the organization” permission. If you have a reason why you need to use external storage, reach out to the security department for guidance at security@kent.edu.