Sensitive Data CoP Meeting 11: AARNet’s sensitive data journey
Channel: Australian Research Data Commons - ARDC
Date: 19/10/2020

Title: Sensitive Data CoP Meeting 11: AARNet’s sensitive data journey – an infrastructure provider’s perspective.
Date: 14/10/21
Presenters: Dr Frankie Stevens and Robert Pocklington, AARNet

Description: 11th meeting of the Sensitive Data Community of Practice, co-facilitated by ARDC, Australian Data Archive and AARNet. This community meets monthly to discuss issues and solutions for the management of sensitive research data. For more information, see the community webpage.
Abstract: As a critical element of Australia’s research infrastructure landscape, Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) is intricately involved in providing research relevant infrastructure solutions to Australia’s research community. Such services include CloudStor, the national storage, analysis and management platform in use across Australia by over 90K researchers. AARNet has a strategic priority to support and invest in health and medical research infrastructure, and has been approached by the research community to provide sensitive data services, given the perceived gap in services that provide both the security and privacy required for sensitive data research, and the need to collaborate around this. This presentation will describe the journey AARNet has undertaken with respect to maturing CloudStor to be sensitive data appropriate, not only for the health and medical community, but also for other communities around Australia who deal with sensitive data, such as ecologists, cultural and human genomics researchers. The sector analysis and subsequent Proof of Concept (POC) project will be described and early demonstrations of the platform, including authorisation workflows, multi-factor authentication, audit trails and more will be shared. AARNet’s plans for the subsequent pilot and production systems will also be described. This presentation will inform current CloudStor users of the upcoming new features of the separate Sensitive Data service, and give institutions a preview of functionality that they have been requesting to host and manage their institution’s sensitive research data assets.