Secure and Trusted
Governance in the Cloud series - #2, 2024
SDE vs TRE
So here's a question folks - what's a Secure Data Environment (SDE)? And how is it different to a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) ?
A couple of years ago, the thinking was that these things were different; whilst TREs were isolated, secure analytic environments with tightly controlled data ingress-in, and research/analytic results egress-out, SDEs were effectively the data platforms which securely hosted the data sources for these TREs.
I wrote a couple of articles about TREs last year:
- What TREs are: -> Trusted Research Environment (TRE)
- Key principles underpinning TREs: -> Keeping Safe
Nowadays SDEs are used interchangeably to mean TREs, and to keep things simple, I'll just use the terminology SDE from now on.
To recap from these articles, the concept from which the SDEs originated was the Goldacre Review - Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis - which recommended the use of SDEs for NHS health and social care data.
SDEs in this context are succinctly summarised on the NHS England website:
Secure Data Environments are data storage and access platforms, which uphold the highest standards of privacy and security of NHS health and social care data when used for research and analysis. Secure Data Environments give approved users access to relevant health data for research and analysis, without the raw data ever leaving the Secure Data Environment.
The organisation providing the Environment can control many factors, including;
- Who can be a user;
- The data that users can access;
- What users can do in the environment;
- The findings of analysis that users can remove.
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How do I get hold of an SDE ?
My colleagues and I have worked with many NHS organisations over the last couple of years, successfully deploying SDEs by using as a blueprint, the Azure TRE, an open-source accelerator in modernising sensitive data analysis.
In the past we've also built SDE-like solutions on AWS, and more recently we've seen DataBricks with their own SDE solution accelerator too.
We've worked with clients who have used suppliers who provide SDE-as-a-Managed-Service, with mixed results, and internationally we have seen some SaaS solutions, although these can be a little pricey.
Our go-to solution however is the Azure TRE accelerator whenever our clients, (and not just in Health and Life Sciences either) require an SDE for secure research and analytics with their sensitive data.
Last time you mentioned the great work happening with the NHS SDE - what's so great about it?
Whilst the SDE accelerators and other related products provide really great technical solutions, when implementing them into an organisation, they will need to integrate and align with organisational Data Governance policies and regulations.
That's where the NHS SDE [https://digital.nhs.uk/services/secure-data-environment-service] is really great - it has implemented wrap around, end-to-end, governance in the use of the SDE (People-Process-Technology paradigm).
Coming up next time
I'll be diving deeper into the NHS SDE, and why its approach is a great model for organisations seeking to deploy their own SDE.
See you next time!
Helping companies, understand, manage and make decisions using data.
6 个月Some great content there Kam, a really interesting topic. What I think is really interesting, potential topic for another post, is how this framework could be used in non-NHS organisations. I look forward to reading your next post.