With the ever increasing popularity of R, Stata and Python as alternatives to SAS, the company has seemed desperate to make itself available to the academic arena while continuing to charge exorbitant pricing for the software, again the free R option.
SAS made “SAS University” available for free, which was a fully capable SAS system in a virtual machine. This took a little work to get going but is a breeze if you are familiar with setting up a VM, but a steep learning curve or even barrier to entry for others.
Now we have SAS On Demand for Academics. A cloud solution. This immediately should raise enormous warning flags for anyone familiar with the responsibilities about data storage in the cloud; to summarise: you very likely must not use “SAS On Demand for Academics” if you want to operate ethically and follow Good Research Practices. Until the cloud storage is cleared by your institution’s legal team, just don’t touch it with anything other than dummy data for training.
What about your research students with their project data? No!
Mac OS users … no options anymore.
Time to move to R Studio.