Data Safe Haven
Project researchers need access to highly sensitive data from real-world patients to develop cardiovascular digital twins. For researchers to do their work securely, the Alan Turing Institute is hosting these datasets in its own Secure Research Environment (SRE): A computational environment with technical and process controls for safe data access. The technical controls are provided by the Turing Data Safe Haven, an open-source project for the deployment of SREs in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The process controls are managed by the Trusted Research team, a team within the Turing's Research Engineering Group in charge of secure data management.
For the CVD-Net project, we are using two SRE instances:
- The Staging SRE: This SRE receives the raw patient data from our project partners. It is in this environment that the Data Wrangling team consolidates and anonymises the data so it can be safely shared with the project researchers. Given its access to real patient data, digital twin evaluation is also performed in this environment.
- The Insights SRE: This SRE receives the processed datasets developed by the Data Wrangling team, so project researchers can develop digital twin models without any risk of compromising patient privacy.
As part of the project, we will contribute to the Turing Data Safe Haven codebase by building features to make it more cost-efficient and by making it easier to take data, code and other resources from one SRE and use in the other.
Key Features
- Secure, isolated research environments for sensitive data analysis
- Controlled access management and data governance
- Scalable infrastructure using Microsoft Azure
- Familiar data science and analysis tools for researchers
- Compliance with data protection standards and regulations
Community Resources
The Data Safe Haven is an open-source community project with active development and support. For more information or to get involved, you can:
- Visit the Data Safe Haven documentation
- Join the Slack workspace for questions and discussions
- Explore the GitHub repository for code and development