Federation
SeRP Federation is opening up safe access to data held in disparate Trusted Research Environments TREs.
The UK wide data research landscape is currently a fragmented picture of multiple data sets, in multiple TRE’s, housed by multiple organisations. Research at scale is difficult to achieve against this backdrop.
Federated data access enables parallel access to data housed in multiple, physically separated environments without data moving from their host environments. These data are accessible in their host location to a researcher in a remote, secure environment where researchers can see the data required for their research projects.
SeRP has developed a unique tiered approach in data governance that enables researchers to access data across multiple data repositories. This has been achieved via two federated solutions developed by SeRP, known as TRE-FX and TELEPORT.
Federation projects
TRE-FX
The TRE FX solution enables packaged analyses, using the same analysis methodology, to be sent to a network of environments in parallel through containerised workloads to draw back results from each environment, with no direct access to the underlying individual level data other than in viewing its metadata and characteristics through a central workload delivery function. This technology underpins federated access to TRE repositories that allows approved researchers from around the globe to securely access and analyse data held across different data repositories.
TELEPORT
TELEPORT is a SeRP solution that can be deployed to sit across two or more TRE’s as a ‘pop-up TRE’ that has full governance controlled by all participating TRE’s. Researchers wishing to access data across TRE’s would apply to each TRE and follow their access procedures. Upon approval, researchers are provided access to the pop-up TRE through a web interface, which will offer a research environment that is jointly controlled by all participating TREs. This solution provides a very simple user environment allowing the researchers to handle and analyse the data as they would normally within a TRE. This solution requires the data to sit in an environment outside of the original TRE repository, albeit in an environment that is still governed by the data controller.
