Breakout: TRE standardisation & accreditation#
Prompts#
Is there a feasible minimum standard that can be achieved agnostic to the research/data domain?
Who should be responsible for developing, maintaining, & accrediting such a standard? Who needs to provide input to this standard?
Notes#
Already standardisation efforts in Health, but NERC are looking to setup TRE for open environmental data
Lots of commonalities across TREs, Turing has mostly been handling non-health data (e.g. finance, Government). Having a framework for categorising data was very helpful.
Common core requirements across all projects/TREs such as standardised logins, ingress/egress systems
Currently in people’s heads, not yet written down
Two main aspects:
Communication to potential researchers (what do tiers mean, what should they expect, what applications are required)
Maintenance of standard, e.g. Docker/docker-compose can be used on laptops but also deployed on cloud
Who’s responsible for maintaining standard over time, who checks you’re still compliant?
Community standards body, modelled after IEEE web groups/RFCs, or industry bodies like CNCF Validation more difficult, not as simple as an automated test suite.
For NHS data NHS probably wants to be the final arbiter
Can the DARE working groups (or RSE TRE WGs) take ownership?
Maybe rather than a standard what we need are a minimum set of features that define what it is to be a TRE (of a certain tier)
Turing deliberately spent a lot of effort on defining data tiers because potentially couldn’t rely on 5 safes as much as other TREs, so technical controls were more important
Reproducible deployment and tear-down built-in from beginning, each project has a disposable environment
What can we do so that a TRE operator using a standard TRE codebase or architecture can shortcut the accreditation process instead of having the full tech stack being audited from scratch
DEA accreditation? Pathway for accrediting a processing environment
Arguably too much focus on infrastructure as code, e.g. should also need focus on governance