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Building a secure infrastructure for exposome data
CSC – IT Center for Science is the Finnish national High Performance Computing (HPC) centre, providing cloud computing, networking and data services to academia, research institutes, public sector and industry. A non-profit, state-owned company, it is the lead partner in the HEAP project's “Secure Infrastructure for Big Data” Work Package.
CSC’s role in the HEAP project
CSC will develop and host the secure IT infrastructure for the “Information Commons” that will contain all identifiable data managed by HEAP. The CSC Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) fulfils all the standards and requirements for strong cybersecurity, including well-regulated and tested Access, Authentication and Authorisation, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant data processing. The platform provides a secure and isolated computing environment for accessing the data.
Strategic fit with HEAP
CSC supports the goal of the HEAP project in opening up national data warehouses for the use of individuals and wider society. Through HEAP, CSC will promote utilization and cross-utilization of data resources, and pave the way for new scientific insights into the exposome and how it affects health.
Previous experience
CSC is already leading the development of European sensitive data infrastructures through existing projects. These include the Finnish ELIXIR node (www.elixir-finland.org) that provides data management solutions for life-science including data transfer, experiment-related meta information, and cloud and AAI services for sensitive, health-related data.
CSC has also worked with Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet to tested integrity-proof integration of KI infrastructures for big data and CSC secure cloud services, showing that Swedish personal data can be safely managed on the CSC secure cloud.
What is new about CSC’s work on the HEAP project?
The HEAP IaaS, as developed by CSC, will have new tools for working with cohort data, in particular the storage of metadata for personal data to make it FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
Another new feature will be the integration with the Hopsworks Platform as a Service software, as developed by HEAP partner Logical Clocks.
Collaboration
In developing the HEAP IaaS, CSC will work with Dutch legal experts MLC Foundation (MLCF) to design the ethical and regulatory framework to enable the use of pseudonymised data. CSC will also work closely with the Medical University of Graz (MUG), that is providing models and tools for data harmonization, representation, management and data interoperability. |
