EOSC-ENTRUST
A European Network of Trusted Research Environments
Countries and institutions have made significant investments in secure and trusted data environments to meet the need for research and policy-driven analysis of sensitive datasets such as people’s health and socio-economic status or the habitats of vulnerable species. There are now a large number of such secure environments linked to national centres, individual organisations or specific research communities. Due to this fragmented landscape researchers are faced with a large number of different systems and access procedures. Also, providers need to manage federated access across multiple, potentially incompatible, technology and governance frameworks.
EOSC-ENTRUST brings together providers of operational Secure Processing Environments (SPEs) and Trusted Research Environments (TREs) from 15 European countries with a shared goal to implement, validate and promote their capabilities through a common European framework using shared standards and common legal, operational and technical language.
EOSC-ENTRUST has identified four driver projects covering genomics, clinical trials, social science, and public-private partnerships to benchmark capabilities, inform blueprint design and demonstrate secure data analysis using federated workflows. Targeted outreach activities will expand this network with further providers and develop policy papers and guidelines to create a long-term operational SPE/TRE framework within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
CSC is actively involved in gathering the requirements and building a roadmap for a blueprint that enables an interoperable network of SPE/TRE services in Europe. Among many responsibilities, CSC is leading the strategic alignment and contribution to the EOSC partnership, and to other relevant initiatives.
CSC is also leading activities required to establish a SPE/TRE Provider Forum and to provide a platform for sharing know-how and advancing convergence of SPE/TRE implementations. This includes creating the first version of the inventory of SPEs/TREs operated by the Forum members, and ensuring the collection of an initial set of high-level requirements and best practices on SPEs/TREs from the Provider Forum members. As part of liaison from the SPE/TRE Provider Forum towards the EOSC, CSC ensures providing information for the providers on the process of listing services to EOSC Exchange and harmonising terminology across the providers.
