The Promises and Perils of Trusted Research Environments

Data Science and machine learning are powered by data, and there is plenty of data today: many human activities are powered by software that generates large quantities of it.
While large datasets are constantly generated, putting them in the hands of the engineers and researchers, who can better exploit them, is not always easy. In domains like finance or health, data sensitivity and user privacy require a limited and controlled distribution of data assets.

Arguably, the gold standard for solving this data availability problem is placing datasets within trusted research environments (TREs). TREs are closed computational environments equipped with technical and process controls that enable secure data access to vetted researchers. The Research Engineering Team at the Turing uses a TRE software, our in-house developed Data Safe Haven, alongside our trusted research process to support academic projects of diverse sizes and domains.

We learned that while software and processes are pivotal to the success of a TRE initiative, there are other external critical factors that, if ignored, can derail an academic project. For example, placing data in a TRE comes with regulatory and legal obligations that need to be addressed way before onboarding the researchers into the system. Or dealing with researcher frustration when facing the necessary security controls imposed by platform and process. In this talk, we will rely on years of experience to describe these external factors, their influence on the success of a TRE initiative, and how we approach them at Turing.

We will discuss:

• Enabling data-driven research with TREs.
• Software and process: The essential factors of every TRE initiative.
• External critical factors: Legal, financial, data management, usability, and others.
• The Turing way of dealing with these factors, to ensure a successful TRE initiative.

This work is supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant EP/Z531297/1.