How can a University offer better cybersecurity ?

Most of the Universities across the world have shifted to the cloud storage which means the University itself provides cloud services freely to it's  faculty and students. 

For example Alliance University in Bangalore offers 100GB cloud space to its faculty and 2 GB cloud to its students while Google irrespective of student or faculty across the world has been the pioneer in offering free cloud storage of 15 GB to its users for the past 15 years.

As an example all my IT activity in the college have been on cloud for the past ten years and rarely have I worked on local (hard disk) related files. I have also for the past ten years been working on a model that involves using Linux Ubuntu distribution on a USB and accessing Internet through Linux using the institute internet bandwidth. Even inside the classroom I have been using Linux. 

My introduction of Linux to students begins with my asking the students how many of them are hard core Linux users. They usually reply none. Then I ask them, how many of them work of Google, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix, AWS (Amazon Linux 2) and so on, they realise that they have all been hardcore Linux users but nobody created awareness that all their popular software were Linux OS based.

The operations students have been made aware of this very superior OS when i work in the classroom working on Ubuntu Linux on USB. Linux by far offers the maximum security to systems at the lowest costs. Being smart, is the issue here ..

This raises a pertinent question, are we paying more to Microsoft. The Microsoft One Drive is a Linux based application offered at attractive rates to Windows users worldwide. Google works on a Linux distribution tailored for their needs, still an open source software.

Like the mass adoption of Android OS (Linux based free OS) on our mobile phones has made communication, Internet access all very cheap the world over and has spawned the IT developments we have seen over the past many years, all IT related work of word processing and presentation / data base operations / accounts related HR related jobs should migrate to the cloud. (it is happening with Google Office suite, many of the faculty members I have interacted with in the Alliance University)

Th advantage additionally which this offers is that one can reduce buying annual licenses for using MS Operating System and instead channel this money for buying additional powerful hardware running on Linux OS and serving the academic needs of the student community and the University. It additionally improves the cyber security preparedness of the University machines and network, reducing our investments into buying expensive anti-virus software, saving lakhs of rupees annually.

George.