Reliable: Following the principle of "data protection by design", SENSA’s dedicated technical architecture enforces the latest standards in security, data protection and service virtualization. For instance, all of the scientific projects running on the platform are completely isolated from each other in order to ensure that only authorized personnel has access to sensitive data (read ‘Infrastructure features’).

In practice

When and how to use SENSA? Here are some use cases to guide you.

Use SENSA to ... analyse sensitive data:

• Sarah is a researcher at a university and has just obtained ethical approval for a research project she will be leading. The project aims to improve treatment of cancer and involves analysing medical records and patient genomes. Patient data are available in the local university hospital.
• Sarah requests a project space in SENSA.
• After some discussion with our experts, she specifies that she needs 20 compute cores, 400 GB of storage as well as bioinformatics data analysis software tools such as tophat and bowtie.
• Additionally, she provides the contact information of her project members requiring user accounts on the platform. Her project team is mainly based in Switzerland, with collaborators in Sweden.
• Next, Sarah requests the required data from the hospital who will transfer it to SENSA. Our legal experts help her with the preparation and signature of a Data Transfer and Use Agreement.
• One of Sarah’s project members receives a short training to receive the data in an encrypted way from the hospital. Other project members can then login into the project space and use state-of-the-art bioinformatics software tools to analyze the medical records and genomes made available to the project.
• Additionally, Sarah requests support on how to manage and organize scientific project results during the data analysis. Our experts have data management expertise and propose tools such as ViKM which they can install and operate in Sarah’s project space

Use SENSA to ... host a web application:

• Peter’s research group has developed a web application which uses patient information on a highly contagious disease.
• This software application must be accessible over web browsers to a restricted user community based in three different universities.
• Data protection laws require that the data are well protected. Therefore, SENSA operates the web application and stores the data in an encrypted environment.
• Peter’s software developers will receive privileged access to update the web application on SENSA and upload new data via a Secure File Transfer Service.
• Users of the web application will receive access codes to access the application from within their university networks. In this way, Peter is sure that only explicitly identified and authorized people can use the web application.
• Legal documents such as a Data Processing agreement are signed by Peter and SIB before any sensitive personal data are transferred to SENSA.

Use SENSA to ... run a national platform containing citizen-provided health data:

• Researchers Sophie and Eric plan to build a national platform which allows scientists to access and use citizen-provided data, as part of an SPHN project.
• The platform should accept data from each of Switzerland’s five university hospitals and should be accessible to researchers all over Switzerland – a typical case for data interoperability between hospitals and different regional BioMedIT Nodes (Basel, Romandie and Zurich).
• As SENSA is part of the BioMedIT network, it provides the necessary support to Sophie and Eric to design and implement the project to run on the national BioMedIT infrastructure.

Your benefits

SENSA draws on the coordinated expertise of several UNIL and SIB groups in the biomedical and information security domains to offer you much more than a secure computing environment. When using SENSA, you gain access to a dedicated set of expertise in: