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Cornell University

Survey Research Institute

at Cornell University

Secure Data Storage

At the Cornell University Survey Research Institute, we take data protection seriously. Below is a summary of our cybersecurity framework:

Vendor relationships

We partner with Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) and the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) to oversee our technology and security.

Hosting environment

SRI's servers are hosted in CIT's collocation datacenter and are managed by datacenter staff. Available security patches are regularly applied and servers are actively monitored for any sign of problems.

Redundancy and backups

SRI services use several levels of digital storage: redundant internal power supplies and storage area network (SAN) technology. We back up all active data collection projects in full daily. In addition, we back up database transactions several times daily to minimize any possibility of data loss in the event of server problems.

Secure data transmission

Our web survey system use Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption to ensure all data is safe when sent between a respondent's computer and our web server. This encryption is of the same grade used in online banking. To avoid the security issues often associated with email, we utilize Cornell's internal DropBox service when delivering any sensitive information, and for delivering survey data after collection is complete.

Talk to us about your project, and we'll help you keep it safe.