Data Access Broker: machine-actionable workflows to access sensitive data

About

The use of data that is sensitive of nature is becoming increasingly more prominent. In research fields, such as life sciences, socials sciences and humanities, the most valuable insights are obtained by analyzing sensitive data. The access to sensitive data however is extremely tedious and has shown to slow down or even block research projects.

At SURF, the national infrastructure provider for research and education in the Netherlands, we are working on a prototype service that aims to simplify and speed up the access to sensitive data. In this talk we wish to shed light on the Data Access Broker, which standardizes the process of accessing data stored in various storage systems and make them available in (cloud-based) [Trusted Research Environments][1] (TREs). TREs are controlled remote compute environments that allow for the data provider to remain in full control of the data while still allowing the data consumer to analyze the data. The Data Access Broker fills the crucial role of bringing data to compute environments which are currently out of bounds because of their sensitive nature.

Part of this talk will be a live demonstration of the end-to-end workflow of the Data Access Broker, both from the perspective of the data provider as well as the data consumer.

[1]: https://www.surf.nl/en/themes/research-infrastructure/sane-secure-environment-for-analysing-sensitive-data

(This abstract is submitted for a Regular Talk, but can be adapted to a Lightning Talk if needed)

00:00:00 Slide 1

00:00:11 Slide 2

00:02:02 Slide 3

00:02:28 Slide 4

00:02:54 Slide 5

00:04:18 Slide 6