Putting Confidential Data in the Clouds

This blog is designed to chronicle progress on a new project at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research funded by the National Institutes of Health, Office of the Director through the Challenge Grant Program. The primary goal of the grant is to test whether confidential data, that is data distributed under license or contract, can be effectively and safely disseminated via the computing cloud. Currently data licenses and contracts put the burden of securing data files on the user. This often involves elaborate data security plans that may involve purchasing new technology or securing existing networks and machinery. This grant is to test whether we can dynamically configure temporary computing environments in the Cloud that will provider users with a secure environment in which to analyze confidential data. We will be building both the application that provisions this analytic instance and the web interface to help users navigate it. The experimental part of this project is to test cloud security and analyst's reaction to more distant analytic environments where they have less control. We have partners in this endeavor to help us recruit users to test the applications we build. They are at the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey.

This is the first day of the project!