Digital Research Environment

What challenges does DRE solve?

DRE solves many of the current problems researchers face, such as: time, right tools, cost, scalability, effectiveness, security & control.

What's the current problem?

Time
It is time consuming to:

1. Extract data
2. Collaborate
3. Set up environment
4. Store and manage data

Right tools
It is difficult and expensive to get the fit-for-purpose tools in place.

Cost

• Difficult to assign cost and control cost
• Data to 'lost' after every research

Scalability

• Difficult to get enough compute power
• Difficult to combine and re-use data for larger datasets

Effectiveness

• Difficult, near impossible, to combine data sets
• Difficult to collaborate effectively and share data
• Difficult to get insight into progress

Security & Compliancy

• Sharing data over unsecure channels
• Difficult to comply to laws and regulations
• Difficult to monitor if your institution is complying to laws

Does the DRE solve all of these challenges?

In fact, yes. You will get cost control (pay for compute capacity by the second), control over security of you data, compliancy, who you collaborate with, and you can monitor progress, output and the data itself.

But way more important: DRE will make your life as a researcher as easy as possible. You will be able to get more research done in less time, need less time to completion and effectively produce more output and recognition.

Preinstalled and own tools

The DRE consists of a web-interface enabling access to virtual machines. Preinstalled tools consist of programs such as SPSS, R Studio, Matlab, and Office, but you are free  to install your own tools.

Because of the security boundary around workspaces, it is possible to offer users the ability to install their own tooling without harming others.

Thanks to the flexibility of the Azure cloud platform, on which the DRE has been built, we can offer a variety of virtualized hardware, including (but not limited) to:

• Standalone virtual Windows / Linux machines (e.g. 72 cores, 144 Gb RAM);
• Compute Clusters (HPC);
• Web-Servers;
• Several storage options (tables/files/SQL/etc.).

Key features of DRE

• Import data sources, organize data, store data securely
• Use, manage, combine and re-use data
• Handle multiple types of data: clinical, images, omics, etc.
• Generate virtual workspaces for researchers
• Use the research tools and applications you want
• Invite fellow researchers into your workspace to collaborate on data and analysis
• Access it anywhere, any time, on any device
• With top security
• All data is compliant, by design
• Pseudonymization software
• High-performance computing
• For single and multi center studies
• A catalogue with data for re-use
• Self-service for researchers