Building services for sensitive research data

TrackTrack 3 (Auditorium 3)
DescriptionData based on human subjects are a rising trend in current research, for example in life sciences, social studies, and medicine. This is creating a huge demand for infrastructure and research support services for sensitive research data, as existing resources are not capable, security-wise, legally or capacity-wise, to handle this type of data.

To address this problem, the University of Oslo central IT-department (USIT), with support from two different projects funded by the Research Council of Norway, have started a project for establishing services for sensitive research data. The project will involve a broad range of institutions, including the national research network (UNINETT), The Data Inspectorate, The Norwegian Directorate of Health and Oslo University Hospital.

The goal of the project is to provide a set of secure, legal and user-friendly services for researchers working on sensitive data, including health-data that demand the highest level of security. These services will enable researchers to focus work on their research material rather than building or maintaining computer infrastructure for sensitive data. The services will include, storage, data collection, computational resources for running analysis, archiving and a backup service. The Norwegian national infrastructure for research data, NorStore is one of the funding projects, and the implication is that the services will be provided for researchers nation-wide. The project will establish and put the services into production by the end of 2014, but a working solution with a subset of the complete set of services will be available earlier.

In this talk we present the project and discuss aspects related to security, authentication mechanisms, and requirements from user communities, such as the need for sharing of data and collaborative tools within a secure context.

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