U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
National Institutes of Health
eRA IntranetAs we informed you in the last eRA Items of Interest, eRA is planning to migrate its modules and data to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud April 17-20 (Fri-Mon).
During this cloud migration, from 8 a.m. ET on Friday, April 17 to 8 p.m. ET on Monday, April 20, all eRA modules (eRA Commons, ASSIST, IAR, iEdison, etc.) and all informational websites (era.nih.gov, etc.) will be unavailable.
Any affected due dates will be covered under NIH’s late application policy due to COVID-19, which allows all late applications submitted late for due dates between March 9, 2020, and May 1, 2020, to be accepted through May 1, 2020.
Grants.gov will continue processing applications during the migration window. Applications received via Grants.gov will be put in a queue, and then eRA will process them on Monday night, April 20. The standard 2-day viewing window for successfully submitted applications will be applied.
These migration dates were carefully selected to reduce the impact on the applicant/grantee/reviewer community. Standard submission due dates, continuous submission, small business due dates, review meetings, etc. were examined, and April 17 to April 20 worked out to be the single best time for this migration.
eRA has spent the last two years in extensive preparation to move to the AWS cloud and has already successfully migrated two non-production environments (including User Acceptance Testing, which migrated to the cloud in February 2019) without issue.
Cloud computing provides us with a number of advantages. These include improved security, reliability, and scalability of the system.
Note that eRA will be closely monitoring the availability of staff needed to do the migration and will send confirmation of its plans late next week. For information, please see the eRA Cloud Migration webpage.