The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities began switching its e-mail servers over to Google this week — a change announced last spring that will allow increased savings and technological advantages for students.

According to Google spokesperson Aviva Gilbert, worldwide there are thousands of universities and more than six million individual users of Google’s services, which are provided free to higher education institutions.

“Of course we want more people using our products,” Gilbert said. “For one, it helps us make better products and second, if you graduate from the University of Wisconsin and really like Gmail, maybe you’ll get it for your company.”

While the popular trend among colleges to outsource their e-mail clients to private companies continues to grow, the University of Wisconsin system remains hesitant to hand over sensitive information to outsiders like Google.

Schools like University of Southern California, Arizona State University and Northwestern are all long-time clients of Google, and others are making the switch as well. Like UM, Hamline University has begun to switch their servers over this semester.

A university that signs an agreement with Google has all the same applications that have been branded for Google’s business apps, such as e-mail, instant messaging, calendar and word processing, plus the ability for students to keep their college e-mail address for life.

“UW is already in the process of arranging a formal license so that some of what’s already happening with students, faculty and staff using Google will be a bit more official and protected in terms of Google’s access or use of the data,” said Brian Rust, communications manager for the UW Division of Information Technology.

UW has been looking into the feasibility of moving to a third party provider for e-mail, but Rust said there are no specific plans to do anything in the future.

“We need to manage our own data — there’s a lot of concern about what happens when you entrust your mail to a third party. We’re going slow and being very cautious as we look into the possibility of moving over,” Rust said.

Gilbert said often times when Google sits down with schools and shows them their security documentation, the institution feels more comfortable because usually it is something they could do themselves.

“A lot of security barriers are kind of emotional; it’s hard to feel secure about something you can’t necessarily touch,” Gilbert said. “But University of Minnesota is not a security company, it’s a university.”

Harry Pontiff, director of special projects and information security at Hamline, agreed universities should be wary of third parties handling their data but felt security was the deciding factor for Hamline to make the switch.

Contractually, Hamline has exclusive administrative control over the information sent through Google’s services and Google simply agrees to keep the servers up and running, said Pontiff.

“With our limited staff, if something goes wrong, how soon are they going to be able to get there in the middle of the night or on a weekend, versus Google’s empire and army of engineers who are there around the clock 24-7? Can they make it more secure than we can make it? Of course they can,” Pontiff said.