The UW–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (VCRGE) and the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) are excited to announce ResearchDrive, a secure, shareable data storage solution for faculty principal investigators (PIs), permanent PIs, and their research group members. The new service is the first phase of a Research Cyberinfrastructure strategic initiative that is a collaborative effort with the VCRGE, DoIT, the Research Technology Advisory Group (RTAG), the Libraries, and campus research computing centers to support the growing data and computing needs of researchers.
The university provides each PI with 5 terabytes (TB) available at no cost and additional storage at $200/TB/year including support, training, and onboarding for researchers. The quota per PI ensures that ResearchDrive is a predictable resource that can be leveraged for faculty recruitments and included in data management plans and grant proposals. ResearchDrive is suited for a variety of research purposes, including storing research data and files, storage for data inputs/outputs of research computing, archiving data, and others. It is a secure and permanent place to store data and includes security and data protection features based on the NIST Cybersecurity framework such as encryption, snapshots, off-site replication, ransomware protection, and monitoring by the Cybersecurity Operations Center (CSOC).
ResearchDrive interacts seamlessly with Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. High speed connectivity is available anywhere on the UW campus network or off campus with a VPN client. ResearchDrive makes secure collaboration easy by leveraging NetID authentication via the Campus Active Directory and Manifest services to provide fine grained role based access control including the ability to delegate administrative functions to IT support or research support staff and provides access for external collaborators at other institutions. Technical integrations with campus computing and instrument resources to enable researchers to use it for more data- and computation-intensive workflows are underway.
Though ResearchDrive is a secure place to store data, it does require additional compliance processes in order to meet HIPPA, CUI, or restricted data standards to ensure end-to-end security of research workflows. It is important to understand your responsibilities for identifying, transmitting, redistributing, storing or disposing of sensitive information. For more information, refer to UW-Madison’s guide to handling sensitive data, and the UW System policy.
ResearchDrive is currently available for researchers that work with public, internal, or sensitive data with full support for restricted data types in conjunction with the Office of Cybersecurity and Office of Compliance coming soon in early 2020.
If you are interested in setting up an account follow this link. Here you will also find tutorials on how to set up your account, transfer data, set permissions, guides for accessing storage broken down by operating system, and instructions on how to restore your data using built-in backup features. Your departmental IT support person may also be able to help you set up and use your account. ResearchDrive is UW–Madison’s newest and most comprehensive tool for managing the type of data intensive projects that define contemporary research.