March 1, 2024 marked the beginning of the EU-funded project EOSC-ENTRUST, which aims to improve the way Europe handles sensitive data. The project is led by ELIXIR and EUDAT and brings together partners from 15 European countries for three years with an EU grant of €4.2 million.
EOSC-ENTRUST will establish a network of secure research environments called Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and develop a plan for how researchers can securely share and analyze data. These environments, also known as Safe Processing Environments or Data Safe Havens, ensure privacy and legal compliance when working with confidential information by accrediting selected researchers with access, logging activities, and limiting and controlling which information can leave the secure computing environment.
EOSC-ENTRUST stands for "European Open Science Cloud - European Network of TRUSTed Research Environments".
Currently, there are different systems and procedures for managing these environments in Europe, making it difficult for researchers and providers to collaborate. EOSC-ENTRUST seeks to create a more uniform approach to addressing these challenges by collaborating with providers from different countries and adopting common standards for structure, associated procedures, as well as a unified language and terminology. It also aims to develop a common understanding of the requirements and specifications regarding the security of the delimited computer environments.
The project will also develop guidelines on how to ensure that different technologies and regulations can work together. This includes testing and validating these concepts in various areas such as genomics, clinical trials, and social science. Finally, EOSC-ENTRUST will work to raise awareness of these research environments and develop long-term guidelines for their use. It will collaborate with other projects working in similar areas to ensure that researchers can work safely and effectively with sensitive data in the future.
"It will be a significant effort with the absolutely necessary security infrastructure that enables research on sensitive data, which will only increase and become more important." Rene Belsø, Data Management Consultant, DeiC.
Read more about EOSC-ENTRUST: About | European network of trusted research environments (EOSC-ENTRUST) project
For more information, contact:
Rene Belsø, Data Management Consultant, rene.belso@deic.dk
Jakob Bech Petersen, Coordinator for activities related to sensitive data, jakob.bech@deic.dk
