Sensitive Data and Trusted Research Environments

If you are carrying out research involving sensitive or confidential information, UCL's Centre for Advanced Research Computing is here to help.

We offer technical solutions and expert guidance on maximising the efficiency of your research while maintaining an appropriate level of information security.

What is a Trusted Research Environment?

To meet their legal, contractual and ethical obligations, many researchers working with sensitive data will need to carry out their analysis in a Trusted Research Environment, or TRE, which is a blanket term for a range of software and hardware configurations as well as integrated information governance processes, all of which have the overarching aim of keeping data stored within them safe.

Implementations vary but are likely to involve data and analysis tools being stored on a virtual machine with strictly limited internet access, a system in place ensuring that users are granted access only to the data they need, and a secure remote desktop connection enabling users to connect to their virtual machine.

How sensitive is my data?

Organisations supplying data under licence for research purposes will often specify what information security arrangements are required to work with their data.

If it's not clear what level of security needs to be applied, please refer to UCL’s Information Governance assurance page.

UCL Trusted Research Environments

If you have confirmed that your project does involve data that needs to be stored and analysed within a Trusted Research Environment, there are two options: UCL’s Data Safe Haven (DSH) and the ARC Trusted Research Environment (ARC TRE).

The Data Safe Haven provides a general computing environment for carrying out research on data which requires additional security assurances, whether due to legislative or contractual obligations. The current system was designed over ten years ago, and meets many research requirements, but it was not designed to support more modern data handling methodologies. The Centre for Advanced Research Computing (ARC) are building a new Trusted Research Environment (the “ARC TRE”) to provide a modern computing environment that provides the flexibility and power to support those UCL researchers for whom the Data Safe Haven is limiting.

The ambition is that the ARC TRE will provide the technical environment to support UCL researchers, replacing the Data Safe Haven and providing the same level of Information Governance assurance. Development is under way and is being carried out in an iterative fashion, with new features being rolled out over time.

UCL ARC and ISD are committed to supporting the Data Safe Haven until the TRE is ready to take on all existing researchers. As new features are available in the TRE, research studies will be migrated in a controlled and supported manner. At this stage it is hard to put a timescale on this. Any changes will be fully supported with training and assistance.

For more information on getting started with the trusted research environments, please see the Information Governance team’s onboarding guide.

UCL Data Safe Haven

The DSH is a TRE that is certified to the ISO 27001 information security standard and complies with the principles contained in the NHS Digital Data Security & Protection (DSP) Toolkit, and can be configured to comply with other security protocols if required by your data provider.

The DSH has a number of features and tools to facilitate data analysis and research software development:

Windows virtual machines with RStudio, Jupyter and Stata installed
An HPC cluster, similar to Myriad, running on Linux with R and Python, and GPU capabilities available
Python development environments with package installation from PyPI and Anaconda (via Artifactory)
R development environment with package installation from CRAN (via Artifactory)
Database options including MySQL and PostgreSQL with PostGIS available for geospatial analysis
Gitlab for software version control

Please refer to the DSH user guide and FAQs for full details on how to use the system.

There is also a DSH data science consultancy service available to help researchers working within the environment make the most of the tools available.

DSH demo

A glimpse into how to upload a file to the DSH, log on to the environment, and access the HPC cluster.

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ARC Trusted Research Environment

The ARC TRE is available at https://tre.arc.ucl.ac.uk/, where you can also find more information on how to use the environment. Certification of the ARC TRE to the ISO27001 information security standard and the NHS Digital's Information Governance Toolkit are planned in the first half of 2025.

We recommend and request that researchers wishing to use the ARC TRE contact the team, so that we can discuss how best to support you, and help you through onboarding and early usage of the environment.

Other options

There are some use cases that the DSH and ARC TRE cannot cater for at present, for example projects involving very large image-based datasets. If your project requirements are beyond the DSH or ARC TRE’s current scope please contact the team.