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Table 1 Benefits of cloud service provision models for storing and computing sensitive data

From: Computing patient data in the cloud: practical and legal considerations for genetics and genomics research in Europe and internationally

 

Commercial clouds

Private, academic, and community clouds

Federated hybrid clouds

Examples

Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, T-Systems, Seven Bridges Genomics

The Embassy Cloud at the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [51]

The public–private partnership model of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud Initiative in Europe [38]

Accessibility

Accessible to the public

Locally managed cloud resource; access is limited to a particular community of users

Federated access to locally managed and commercially available off-site cloud resources through the use of joint interoperable protocols

Benefits

Provide on-demand access to competitive large-scale data storage; have the computational and networking resources to scale processing; can readily store non-data privacy critical (parts of) datasets

Provide on-demand access to well-defined and well-managed data storage and computing infrastructure; provide tightly controlled data access, including to data that cannot be transferred across the internet

Federated model helps to differentiate personal data attributability and limit donor re-identification;

service brokerage supports the matching of data and processing requirements (for example, certification, data security, interoperability, legislation, and geographic location) against a defined catalogue of services offered by connected providers