'Virtual' TREs: Creating a federated, cloud-based trusted research environment to facilitate collaborative research between existing institutions

This report summarises the work undertaken by a consortium led by the Francis Crick Institute, along with BT plc, the Institute of Cancer Research and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, supported by technical partners Infinite Lambda and Snowflake, to create a technology platform that allows for the creation of secure trusted research environments ‘on-demand’, built around the needs and restrictions of individual research projects. We feel this novel paradigm is an essential part of the technical ecosystem needed to work effectively and securely with sensitive data, and complements more typical ‘data-set-centric’ TRE architectures.

The consortium successfully delivered on the aims of the project, producing a fully working platform that allows the configuration and deployment of secure TREs within around 30 minutes, including novel features such as experimental-level billing control, full audit and management reporting, and HIPAA and ISO27001 compliance. The platform is at the time of writing in use for a first research consortium at the Crick, with another 3 in the process of gaining ethical approvals and agreement sign-offs.

This document sets out the discovery and requirements research, summarises the architecture and technology used to build the working platform, a precis of the legal agreement used as part of research collaboration agreements to complement the platform, and discusses the feedback and immediate impacts seen to date. We conclude with a summary of avenues for future work. This report is supplemented by a series of documents and artefacts which provide considerably greater detail for each section, with a view to making this work as reproducible as possible for any other interested party.

This work was funded by UK Research & Innovation as part of Phase 1 of the DARE UK (Data and Analytics Research Environments UK) programme, which is delivered in partnership with Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK).