THE STRATEGIC AGENDA
Technology Stack
HealthyCloud aims to deepen knowledge and establish scenarios on the technological challenges for enabling an information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure that allows secure access to sensitive health research data across Europe. Such infrastructure will be decentralised by design covering a broad range of infrastructures including public and private cloud, edge, high-performance computing as well as on-premises computing.
Importantly, HealthyCloud will look at existing solutions, based on community-driven standards, from an ethically sound and a legally compliant perspective proposing potential extensions to them. The objective is to facilitate the potential up-take of any technological proposition by existing infrastructures. At the same time, recommended standards and protocols should be mature enough to facilitate the adoption by newly established infrastructures.
Data hubs are a complimentary part of these infrastructures although they might not be physically co-located with any major computational capacity. These heterogeneous systems from a multitude of academic institutions, public and private cloud providers, data centres as well as industry representatives will need to be assembled into an integrated, interoperated computer continuum. Indeed, this computational infrastructure for health research across Europe will be fully integrable into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) providing a Ready-to-implement Roadmap for the health data research space.
Another important layer of complexity to take into account is the deployment of analytical software resources and the execution of workflows across the different computational instances taking into consideration all the legal and ethical limitations imposed by European regulations (GDPR) and existing national legislations.