This spring brings a welcome surprise for faculty, staff and graduate employees: the University of Oregon has renewed its Dropbox contract through March 2028.
“VP Razdan and I are excited to continue providing the Dropbox service to the UO community,” said Abhijit Pandit, vice president and chief information officer. “This unexpected development has become a reality thanks to our teams’ persistence and months of tough negotiations with the vendor.”
Starting July 1, Dropbox will pivot toward employee and research use, introducing a new “freemium” model. This approach offers a baseline amount of 2 terabytes of free storage, with additional space available at low, subsidized rates, thanks to Information Services and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation.
Most students will soon be transitioned out of Dropbox. Information Services will notify them directly and provide an exception process for specific academic and research needs. Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint continue to serve as foundational storage for the UO community, including students.
Staff will also notify people using the largest amounts of Dropbox space about potential costs.
New investments in research storage
In addition to the Dropbox changes, this July Information Services will unveil a new data storage service designed to support UO’s diverse research and scholarship needs across the sciences, arts and humanities. The large-scale research storage service is backed by the research office, Information Services and a strategic UO investment, providing secure, low-cost storage at scale., providing secure, low-cost storage at scale.
“By offering low-cost storage options and a flexible range of solutions — from Dropbox to advanced large-scale research storage — we’re giving researchers the ability to focus on what matters most: asking critical questions, analyzing data and pushing the boundaries of discovery,” said Anshuman “AR” Razdan, vice president for research and innovation.
Enhanced licenses for high-speed data transfer will also debut, offering a secure, self-service method for moving files between desktop computers, UO’s high-performance computing cluster, other research institutions and most major research storage platforms. The transfer software, Globus, is also supported by UO’s strategic investment.
Road to renewal
The path to UO’s Dropbox renewal has been anything but easy. In 2024, Dropbox’s 70 percent price hike forced UO into a space-limited contract. As of October, the university planned to end its Dropbox service by 2026. But negotiations took a surprising turn.
“After our last update, the Dropbox team approached us with renewed interest in a mutually beneficial agreement,” said Greg Shabram, chief procurement officer. “Months of negotiations have allowed us to offer this service to the UO community once again.”
Nevertheless, the landscape of software subscriptions has shifted.
“Annual price increases of 5 to 10 percent or more have started to become the norm,” Pandit said. “To address those changes, Information Services is taking a holistic approach — listening to the UO community and evaluating and improving our services to deliver future-ready solutions for the university.”
More changes ahead
A comprehensive new storage optimization and data management effort will continue working on forward-looking services for the university. In the coming months, Information Services will tune diverse platforms — such as Zoom, Dropbox, Canvas, Panopto and Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams — based on analysis of storage usage and costs.
More information is available on the new webpage Our Data Ecosystem: Adapting to a Changing Technology Landscape.
Questions about Dropbox can be directed to UO Dropbox support, IT staff or the Technology Service Desk. Research data storage inquiries should be emailed to Research Advanced Computing Services at racs@uoregon.edu.
—By Nancy Novitski, University Communications
Reminders about employee data-handling responsibilities
UO employees are responsible for being aware of the sensitivity of the data they handle, for using approved storage locations that support that policy, and for following other controls associated with different classes of data. The Information Security Office can help identify secure and compliant solutions. (Some cybersecurity-related resources require a Duck ID login for access.)
Before deleting files or other data, or moving them out of UO systems, employees should be aware of their recordkeeping responsibilities as explained in the short video Records and Our Shared Responsibilities from University Records Management.