CASS - Cloud Archival Storage Service - Institute for Digital Research and Education

CASS Retirement Announcement

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) and the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) will be retiring CASS (the OIT/IDRE Cloud Archival Storage Service) at midnight on December 31, 2020. Current storage agreement(s) will be honored through 2020. No new storage allocations will be sold.

Over the past six years, CASS has served the campus well. Still, over that period, alternative solutions have appeared that offer greater flexibility and cost options. In addition to UCLA Box storage, IT Services has enabled UCLA Google Shared Drives that are free, unlimited, and self-service. To facilitate data movement, Globus connectors are available for UCLA Box, UCLA Google Drive (and Shared Drives), and AWS S3 and S3-compatible storage. UCLA Health researchers should contact UCLA Health IT or the David Geffen School of Medicine IT group.

Information about these and other CASS alternatives will be posted on this webpage as it becomes available. If you have any administrative questions about the CASS retirement, please contact Liz Morin (lmorin@oit.ucla.edu); for technical questions about storage options and moving your data, please contact Scott Friedman (friedman@idre.ucla.edu).

Personal information and sensitive data on CASS

Personal information and other sensitive data, including statutory, regulatory, and contractually protected data — for example, human subjects research, restricted research, student and educational data, and PHI — are prohibited on Hoffman2. (See the UC Protection Level Classification Guide charts on Protection Level 3 and Protection Level 4 for details.)

Researchers using any data defined by UCLA Health as protected health data must contact UCLA Health IT. Such data are prohibited on Hoffman2.

UCLA Health defines ‘health data’ as “any information pertaining to the health, care, and treatment of UCLA Health patients or health plan members which: (1) results in a report used in treatment or monitoring of a patient; (2) generates a claim or a bill for services that are provided; and/or (3) is used for operations, financial management, population health activities or quality metrics.

Prospectively-collected clinical research data and related research results will not be considered Health Data if these data are collected/created exclusively for a sponsored research (“Sponsored Research Data”); however, Sponsored Research Data that appears in the patient’s medical record is Health Data. (The use of Sponsored Research Data may be subject to contractual and regulatory obligations; release of Sponsored Research Data to any entity other than the sponsor of the study must be reviewed in advance by the Clinical Trials Administration Office.) Non-health data is all other data collected at UCLA Health.”

Please contact the Director of the IDRE Research Technology Group if your research requires use of these types of data, or if you have any questions. More information about security requirements can be found at security.ucop.edu.