Confidential and sensitive data | Edinburgh International Data Facility

EPCC offers two distinct sets of services to store and process sensitive and confidential data: EPCC Safe Haven Services and EIDF Confidential Data Workspace. EIDF provides many services to store and process non-sensitive and non-confidential data, including EIDF Virtual Desktops. In the table below we compare the features of three services.

EPCC offers two distinct sets of services to store and process sensitive and confidential data:

EPCC Safe Haven Services
EIDF Confidential Data Workspace

EIDF provides many services to store and process non-sensitive and non-confidential data, including EIDF Virtual Desktops.

In the table below we compare the features of three services.

Feature	EPCC Safe Haven Services	EIDF Confidential Data Workspace	EIDF Virtual Desktop
Accreditation
ISO27001 accredited	Yes	Yes	Yes
Digital Economy Act 2017 accredited	Yes	No	No
NHS Digital Toolkit self-accredited	Yes	No	No
Cyber Security self-accredited	Yes	Yes	Yes
Assistance with 3rd- party penetration testing	Yes	No	No
Data and usage policies & agreements
Storage of unconsented identifiable special-category PII	Yes	No	No
Storage of de-identified or consented PII	Yes	Yes	No
Agreements and policies	TRE Service Agreement (available upon request)	EIDF usage and data policies⁵	EIDF usage and data policies ⁵
Project leads and managers has sudo (super/admin user) access on virtual machines	No	Yes	Yes
Project lead and managers can transfer data in and out of virtual desktops	No	Yes	Yes
Project users can transfer data in and out of their virtual desktop	No	No	Yes
EPCC support
Helpdesk tickets to resolve issues that require EPCC staff to login to the virtual machines or interact with project data (e.g., upgrade software in a VM to newer version, copy data into storage)	Yes	No	No
Helpdesk tickets to resolve issues that do not require EIDF staff to login to the virtual machines (e.g., not able to login to a desktop)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Setup and bootup the virtual infrastructure	Yes	Yes	No
Data wrangling (ingress, clean, filter, transform, egress) or analysis (train/test models, quality-check, disclosure tests)	No⁴	No⁴	No⁴
Dedicated service manager for the project	Yes	No	No
Infrastructure cost
20TB storage included	Yes	No²	No²
1/3 server included	Yes	No¹	No¹
Electricity cost	Equal share of entire SHS cost	Included in cost of each infrastructure component	Included in cost of each infrastructure component
Staff costs	Equal share of entire SHS cost + cost to cover share of helpdesk ticket load	Included in cost of each infrastructure component	Included in cost of each infrastructure component
Project leads and managers can switch on/off use of virtual services	No	Yes	Yes
Backups and disaster recovery
Infrastructure disaster recovery included to different media	No⁶	No⁶	No⁶
14-days rolling backups on same media	Yes	No	No
Additional compute resources
Safe Haven GPU Cluster	Yes¹	No	No
Safe Haven CPU Cluster	Yes¹	No	No
EIDF GPU Service	No	In development¹	Yes¹
EIDF Cirrus (CPU)	No	No	Yes¹
Target costs (not price!)
Approx guidance on cost per annum	£200,000 ³	£30,000 ³	£15,000 ³

¹ Billed in units per hour depending on the type of virtual machine (#cores, #GPUs, #memory, #VM-storage) and GPU/CPUs, e.g., GPU-hours reserved on the SHS GPU Cluster.

² Billed in TB-hours per month where price depends on type of storage used, VAT, commercial or academic.

³ Prices depend both on the type of customer (internal or external to university, grant collaborator or not, commercial or public sector) and the type and amount of resources the customer requires. Here we provide typical costs. Our pricing is based on staff costs, electricity, licenses, capital depreciation, overheads, estates, VAT, etc.

⁴ Data wrangling, data analyses and software/infrastructure engineering tasks can be performed by EPCC staff and are separately agreed and costed in a contract.

⁵Users are responsible for managing the access to the Confidential Data Workspace VMs including Router management. The EIDF team are not responsible for any unauthorised or unexpected access to VMs including ingress or egress of data or network traffic. The EIDF team will not be able to assist with any issues arising from unauthorised access to VMs or data sharing.

⁶ Disaster recovery copies can be arranged and will be costed in addition.

This article was published on 2026-03-25