Additional Information on Upcoming Changes to the IT Storage Strategy

Posted in UIS News & Announcements  |  Tagged

Dear Colleagues:

In response to some questions I have received, I would like to share additional information on our IT storage strategy.

Why are we Reducing our Box Usage?  When we signed our original contract with Box, Box offered all higher education institutions unlimited storage. We were recently notified that we would need to limit our storage to 164TB to stay at our current level of spend. We are currently at a little over 300TB of storage and grow at a rate of 20-30TB per month.  

Can we Negotiate with Box?  We were able, after many months, to negotiate a phased ramp down to 164TB over the next 31 months. By this December, to avoid additional costs we must be at 265TB and by December 2021 at 215TB. If we go over these limits we will incur costs of $820 per TB per year.

What are we doing about this? UIS is performing an assessment to examine our current Box usage and develop a strategy to successfully migrate data to stay within our storage caps. We are assessing OneDrive, Google Drive and options for limiting the use of Box for specific use cases. We will have more information this summer.

What about Protected Health Information? If you are currently storing PHI in Box, please continue to do so. My team will work with you to ensure that your data remains protected, and if suitable for migration to another HIPAA-compliant option, we will work with you to ensure your data is safely migrated. In this first phase we will be focusing on migrating administrative, non-PHI data.

What does this mean for the rest of my data?  We are assessing all use cases now and encourage individuals to delete files they no longer use. For non-PHI data, we are encouraging the use of Google Drive for now. We ask that individuals do not try to migrate massive amounts of data now as we cannot guard against data loss. We will work with you to migrate shared folders and large amounts of data to ensure your data is safely migrated.

If you have additional questions or concerns please feel free to reach out to us at train@georgetown.edu (new window).

Sincerely Yours,
 
Judd Nicholson
Vice President for Information Technology and CIO
Georgetown University