Across the health industry, be it a pharmaceutical company interrogating clinical trial results, or a public health provider analyzing electronic health records, there is the need to enable researchers, analysts, and developers to work with sensitive data sets.
Trusted Research Environments (TREs) enable organisations to provide research teams secure access to these data sets alongside appropriate tooling to ensure researchers can remain efficient and productive despite the security controls in place.
Further information on TREs in general can be found in many places, one good resource is [HDR UK's website](https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/access-to-health-data/trusted-research-environments/).
The Azure Trusted Research Environment project is an accelerator to assist Microsoft customers and partners who want to build out Trusted Research environments on Azure. This project enables authorized users to deploy and configure secure workspaces and researcher tooling without a dependency on IT teams.
TREs are not “one size fits all”, hence although the Azure TRE has a number of out of the box features, the project has been built be extensible, and hence tooling and data platform agnostic.
Core features include:
- Self-service workspace management for TRE administrators
- Self-service provisioning of research tooling for research teams
- Package and repository mirroring - PyPi, R-CRAN, Apt and more.
- Extensible architecture - build your own service templates as required
- Azure Active Directory integration
- Airlock - import and export
- Cost reporting
- Ready to workspace templates including:
- Restricted with data exfiltration control
- Unrestricted for open data
- Ready to go workspace service templates including:
***This project's code base is still under development and breaking changes will happen. Whilst the maintainers will do our best to minimise disruption to existing deployments, this may not always be possible. Stable releases will be published when the project is more mature.***
The aim is to bring together learnings from past customer engagements where TREs have been built into a single reference solution. This is a solution accelerator aiming to be a great starting point for a customized TRE solution. You're encouraged to download and customize the solution to meet your requirements
This project does not have a dedicated team of maintainers but relies on you and the community to maintain and enhance the solution. Microsoft will on project-to-project basis continue to extend the solution in collaboration with customers and partners. No guarantees can be offered as to response times on issues, feature requests, or to the long term road map for the project.
This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow [Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/trademarks/usage/general).
