EPCC has developed and operates the EPCC Safe Haven Services, an infrastructure for independent organisations to control their own Safe Haven Services under the guidance of the Five Safes framework. The EPCC Safe Haven Services are therefore a Safe Setting that offers a secure data sharing and analysis environment that allows approved researchers access to sensitive, including special category data, under the terms and conditions prescribed by the data providers. EPCC also provides advanced data management and data analytics skills to the Safe Havens that we host. The UK has established the Five Safes framework to foster safe processing of sensitive personal data: Safe People should use Safe Settings to process Safe Data in the context of Safe Projects and only extract Safe Outputs into the public domain. EPCC Safe Haven Services are a Safe Setting, where we partner with independent organisations which implement the other four Safes to each operate their own Safe Haven.EPCC Safe Haven Services provide a multifaceted computational environment, with rich-software virtual machines dedicated to each of the Safe Havens, as well as GPU and CPU compute clusters shared amongst them. Researchers cannot access the Internet or copy-paste into or out of the environment, but Safe Haven controllers can allow them to have controlled access to external software repositories and to import and run containers. We provide in-depth end-user documentation and each partner organisation has access to a dedicated service desk.We also undertake data management tasks for several of our Safe Havens, including sophisticated data anonymisation techniques and scalable data provisioning for researchers. We continually advance our expertise, for example through UKRI-funded projects to investigate Safe Haven federation and to automate metadata publishing.Five Safes: Designing data access for researchEPCC Safe Haven Services user documentationWorking towards frictionless, UK-wide data-driven research and innovationSecurity and information governanceYou can find details of our approach to data security, trusted research environments and information governance on our "security and governance" pages, on the main menu. Security and governance in EIDFAvailabilityPlease contact us via the service desk email below if you want to discuss setting up a Safe Haven.EIDF service desk email link. Specialised Safe Havens EPCC operates the EPCC Safe Haven Services, a secure computing environment through which it provides organisations with the computing infrastructure towards their own Safe Haven. We facilitate these Safe Havens within our secure perimeter, where each Safe Haven is isolated from all other Safe Havens, while also having access to shared computing resources. Each Safe Haven is governed independently by the respective organisation, under the guidance of the Five Safes framework. These independent Safe Havens enable researchers from specialised fields to access public sensitive data to perform studies with a public benefit. EPCC also provides advanced data management and data analytics skills to the Safe Havens that we host. Scottish National Safe Haven We provide the infrastructure and operational systems that underpin the Scottish National Safe Haven. The National Safe Haven is owned by Public Health Scotland and governed by the eDRIS team who control access and manage all research enquiries. This article was published on Friday 24 November 2023
