Note: It is not permissible for OU faculty, staff, and students to upload documents containing PHI to the cloud without a Business Associate Agreement in place with the software vendor. Please see this page for additional information on OU Data Cloud Storage Stipulations.
Whether you are writing your final paper, or editing selfies, data preservation is critical in the digital age. For your non-PHI data, OU IT recommends taking the “Rule of Three” approach, wherein users have three copies of their data.
- Original data stored locally, on your computer’s hard drive. *
- A backup of your local data saved to an external hard drive. *
- Another backup, stored offsite, saved to a cloud solution with a Business Associate Agreement in place. Please see our data table matrix for a list of cloud vendor data restrictions.
* If your data involves PHI, it should not be stored locally on a hard drive or external drive. Instead, a Business Associate Agreement supported cloud vendor should be used.