Keynote: Crick’s TRE: history and approach#

Q&A#

  • How cloud agnostic is it?

    • Azure, AWS and Azure not beyond that (limited to what Snowflake supports)

  • How much of what we saw is in operation? Everything, working for a year and a half

    • focus of the process on legal and agreement aspects via forms

  • Can you explain the metadata side of the platform, EG what software is being used?

    • Snowflake offers standard data model for all objects in all accounts

    • Projects are created in Snowflake sub-accounts

    • Data brought out of Snowflake, collated, and replicated as one outside of Snowflake

  • You have a lot of integration across providers, IBM, microsoft and AWS. How have you overcome interoperability challenges?

    • lot’s of these integrations are at a data level, which is easier than a functionality level for those tools

  • Do you ever act as data processors on behalf of data providers or is this effectively a data hosting service (where the data comes processed by the data providers/controllers)?

    • Both, if you are a data processor on your own right you could bring your own “bedroom” and retain control of it

  • Any idea of cost

  • How are you managing audit and compliance across the three cloud platforms?

    • Snowflake does it! Objects are created by snowflake on the three clouds, ensuring compliance

  • Am I right in thinking you only host consented data?

  • How do users see what they are spending in the platform, or how many of their credits they have used?

    • Automatic threshold detector for every processing compute, message sent depending on threshold (e.g 75%)

  • Who are the Roles (Loader, Processor, etc.) assigned to: study team members, central services, IG specialists?

    • They are assigned by the accountable owners (by authorising emails or actions on servicenow) of each collaborating partner or the board for the collaboration account. So a human can have many roles if approved by their organisation or the project.

  • Can you provide a quick overview of Snowflake and the core features it provides