Cloud infrastructure, trusted research environment and researcher billing

Our Future Health aims to procure secure and scalable public cloud infrastructure for our technology platforms. The selected supplier will be one of our most important technology partners as we build and scale our systems. The cloud infrastructure will underpin web sites and apps used by our participants, a data store and data processing systems, a trusted research environment (TRE) and associated systems used by researchers from around the world, and underlying systems to operate and monitor the programme. The selected supplier will provide UK hosting for secure public cloud infrastructure with a comprehensive set of standard compute, storage and infrastructure services. We are interested to work with cloud providers that have good availability of TRE providers already working within their systems.

Our Future Health is planning to procure a trusted research environment (TRE) to enable registered researchers to access and use data within a single secure environment to conduct approved research studies. The success of Our Future Health rests on the research that is done with the data and the cohort, together with our commitment to robust security, strict governance and participant confidentiality. A TRE is an environment, that may be cloud-based, that allows registered researchers working on an approved study to conduct analysis on de-identified or pseudonymised datasets in a secure manner, where export of results data is permitted but exports of individual level data is not permitted. It is expected that a TRE will create a separate partitioned workspace for each approved study, allow registered researchers to use a variety of common tools for data science, analysis, and research (including large-scale genomic analysis), to upload additional tools and datasets subject to the security restrictions of the environment, to have flexibility in their use of compute and storage resources. A TRE should maintain the access control and secure boundary to prevent unauthorised access to or download of data, and to maintain auditable access and usage logs. The selected TRE (lot 2) will be expected to run on the selected cloud infrastructure (lot 1), with the selected provider of researcher billing (lot 3) providing services to manage the cost and billing of cloud usage by researchers in the TRE. We hope to award contracts in May 2022, have a beta version of a TRE tested and launched by the end of September 2022, and a full version tested and launched by the end of 2022.

In order to provide a scalable and flexible service, where researchers can use the cloud resources that they need, we anticipate a system where researchers pay for their own cloud storage and compute within their TRE workspace. We are therefore planning to procure a partner who can meet the following requirements, working together with the selected provider of public cloud infrastructure (lot 1) and the selected TRE (lot 2): - Billing of researchers and collection of payments to be handled by a supplier or partner, not by Our Future Health. - Our Future Health shall not be liable for the costs of researchers' compute and storage within the TRE. - Our Future Health shall not incur data transfer charges between the primary data store and the TRE. - Cloud pricing shall be uniform for both Our Future Health's usage and researcher usage.