New Security Information on the UW Data Collaborative
Posted: 4/8/2023 (CSDE Research)
The UW Data Collaborative (UWDC) is CSDE’s secure computing platform. The system allows us to host highly sensitive data in a highly secured Windows remote desktop environment. Users can access their data and perform processing on powerful servers using state of the art analytical software such as Stata, SAS, ArcGIS Desktop (ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap) and open-source applications including R, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and QGIS.
The UWDC security environment was recently approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, https://www.cms.gov/) for hosting CMS data sets. This means that researchers who require CMS data can use the UWDC without needing to develop their own data security plan—they will fall under the umbrella of the UWDC Data Management Plan Self-Attestation Questionnaire—so that they can focus on proposal study aims and data requirements in their requests for CMS data.
Additionally, we were recently notified that the University of Washington (along with other institutions of higher education) are exempt from Washington State OCIO (Office of the Chief Information Officer) Standard 141.10 (https://www.ocio.wa.gov/sites/default/files/public/policies/141.10_SecuringITAssets_201711_5.pdf) , which lays out requirements for maintaining system and network security, data integrity, and confidentiality as a precondition for obtaining and hosting certain data sets available from WA State administrative systems. This means that the UWDC can host certain data sets without requiring the extensive documentation detailed in OCIO 141.10. It should be noted that various WA State agencies are likely to require some documentation of security settings, and that this does not mean that data security is less of a concern; it simply means that there should be less red tape to deal with in requesting certain data sets from the WA State government.
The UWDC was featured in the CSDE seminar panel on March 3, 2023, “The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) an Introduction to Analysis of Innovative and Sensitive Information within a Secured Computing Environment.” Presenters included Robert Hummer (Professor of Sociology and Director of the Add Health Study), and Sydney Leigh Will (Data Dissemination & Contracts Manager for the Add Health Study), both at the University of North Carolina, Luciana Hebert (Assistant Research Professor at Washington State University), and Phil Hurvitz (UWDC Director). The panel recording is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcYlqLRx1-Q.
For more information on the UWDC, see https://dcollab.uw.edu/ or contact dcollab@uw.edu.