A new agreement will make 50 gigabytes of secure digital storage available to faculty, staff and students at UNL and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

The agreement with Box Inc., an online file sharing and cloud content management service, will begin later in the spring. The storage is cloud-based and will be accessible from virtually any device using campus credentials. Students graduating may transfer data to a personal box account, which will remain active for life.

More than 240 universities and 82 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Box.

“Box is the gold standard for research universities,” said Mark Askren, UNL’s chief information officer. “It gives our campuses a secure and preferred method to collaborate with other institutions around the world.”

As participating members in Internet 2, a higher education technology consortium, UNL and UNO signed the contract with Box on Feb. 1. University of Nebraska Central Administration and the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture in Curtis, Neb., will also participate in the agreement.

“This is an excellent partnership between our campuses that lowers costs and shares expertise,” said John Fiene, the CIO at UNO. “It leverages our Internet 2 membership to provide secure mass storage for faculty, students and staff that is accessible from all computing platforms.”

Implementation is still in the planning stage and further campus-wide announcements will be distributed as information becomes available.

Campus personnel should be wary of any phishing emails that fraudulently ask the user to “claim their box account” by revealing personal login information. Faculty, staff and students should never click on or respond to any message that asks for credentials or personal information. UNL will never ask for individual login, password or other personal information via email.

Updates on the Box program will be available at http://box.unl.edu.