General Overview

This is a Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) between the campus community and the Information Technology Services Division (ITS) to document:

• The suite of services provided by the Academic Research Systems and Central IT department
• The general levels of response, availability, and  maintenance associated with these services
• The responsibilities of Academic Research Systems and  other Central IT departments as a provider of these services
• The responsibilities of the clients receiving these services

This Agreement is valid from June 23th 2021. Review is every two years, or as otherwise needed.

Roles and Responsibilities

Responsibilities of Academic Research Systems and Central IT:

Academic Research Systems

• Ensure UCSF Security Risk Assessment covering RAE is current
• Monitor resources and provide tuning and advisement for virtual-guest performance issues
• Apply patches and upgrades to applications hosting within RAE
• Manage permissions and security groups within the virtual infrastructure
• Coordinate with vendors for licensing, maintenance and support requests
• Serve as a point of escalation for server administrators managing virtual guests
• Review logs, performance metrics, system status, resource usage and events; identify and implement parameter changes to improve the performance and security of the virtual guest
• Provide engineering assistance to ensure right-size and right-performing virtual guests
• Escalate to Virtual Hosting Engineering for additional support, for issues that might be related to physical hardware resources
• Obtain adequate approval and provision access for user accounts added to RAE

Other Central IT units

• Engineer all layers of the VI technology stack for high availability and compliance with UC, UCSF, and ITS policy
• Apply patches and upgrades as recommended for the virtual infrastructure
• Monitor and tune the physical server and storage environment as needed
• Manage virtual-machine and data backup (Rubrik) software, hardware and backup schedules
• Maintain base OS and network security; this includes OS patching and configuration, as well as firewall settings for the virtual guest
• Create new virtual guests, restore from virtual machine backups, and perform ongoing virtual-hardware changes as needed

Customer Responsibilities

Client responsibilities and/or requirements in support of this Agreement include:

 

PI or site owners:

• The PI or site owner must notify ARS of any study participants whos access needs to be removed or is no longer required.
• The PI, site owner or study participant must notify ARS of any users who have transferred departments and no longer require access to study data.
• The PI or site owner must notify ARS when departing UCSF and transfer to another UCSF owner or archive their study projects
• The PI or site owner is responsible for ensuring that any user added to a RAE study that requires IRB approval, is listed on the IRB.
• The PI or site owner is responsible for classifying and taking inventory of data within their RAE study. 
• User end points (laptops/desktops) connecting to RAE must meet UCSF minimum security standards.
• Communicate any change in security requirements in research agreements to RAE Engineers.
• Request restoration from backups of RAE study data when required.

All users:

• Utilize ServiceNow for inquires, issues and enhancements
• Submit request for software and package to be installed by RAE Hosting engineers
• Users are prohibited from changing configurations, installing programs or abusing any of the existing applications to elevate access
• Abide by the terms mentioned in the Statement of Responsibility
• Individuals are recommended to maintain their data within that environment. Researchers who choose to save data in other forms are personally responsible for the security of the information at all times and are required to comply with all applicable state and federal privacylaws.

Maintenance and Service Changes

The RAE service has a pre-scheduled maintenance windows (which are superseded by campus-wide change-restricted days. Most maintenance will not impact service; in the event that maintenance is expected to result in a service outage, ITS will provide at least two weeks’ notice. The standard window is on Tuesday nights at 6-11:59pm.

Availability

This is a 8-5pm service supported by the Academic Research Systems team. Escalation is provided through Academic Research Systems.

Document Version: 1.0.2 Published: June 29th 2021 Effective: June 23rd 2021

Last Reviewed January 10th, 2025