Notice Number: NOT-OD-20-096

Key Dates
Release Date: April 10, 2020

Issued by
Office of The Director, National Institutes of Health (OD)

Purpose

The electronic Research Administration (eRA) is planning to migrate its modules and data to the cloud April 17-20, 2020 (Fri-Mon).

As a result, 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 the era.nih.gov website will be unavailable. The eRA Service Desk’s ticketing system will be offline and agents will be able to offer only limited support during the migration window. The eRA Service Desk will be fully operational on Tuesday, April 21.

Please note that there is no action required by users before or after the migration. When the systems are back up, the modules and services will function as usual.

Any affected due dates will be covered under NIH’s late application policy due to COVID-19, which allows all applicationssubmitted 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 eRA will process them on Monday night, April 20. The standard 2-day viewing window for successfully submitted applications will be applied.

eRA has spent the last two years in extensive preparation to move the system’s hardware infrastructure to the cloud. This preparation included successful migration of the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and involved extensive performance and load testing to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud environment.

Cloud computing provides eRA with a number of advantages. These include improved security, reliability, and scalability of the systems.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

Systems Policy Branch
Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration
Office of Extramural Research
OPERAsystemspolicy@nih.gov

eRA Service Desk
electronic Research Administration (eRA)
NIH Office of Extramural Research
Submit a web ticket; or
Call Toll-free:1-866-504-9552, Phone: 301-402-7469