AWS Public Sector Blog
Accelerate your organization’s compliance journey with a Secure Research Environment on AWS
Please note that the following post is intended for informational purposes only. The approach detailed below may not be suitable for all organizations and/or compliance programs. It is important to evaluate this potential solution against the compliance needs of your organization and any applicable regulatory obligations you may have.
What if your institution could accelerate research compliance in weeks instead of 12–14 months? Traditional on-premises approaches take so long that by the time you meet requirements, regulators might have already updated the criteria and your researchers might have missed critical funding deadlines. Meanwhile, the grants went to institutions that got compliant faster.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) developed the Secure Research Environment (SRE) to help institutions remain agile and competitive while supporting alignment with evolving security and compliance standards. This preconfigured cloud infrastructure provides a strong security foundation and standardized architectural patterns that can accelerate an organization’s compliance journey as requirements evolve. In constrained funding environments, the SRE helps organizations establish compliance-aligned capabilities early, enabling researchers to focus on discovery and innovation while institutions remain well positioned to compete for grants.
Drawing on extensive experience in cloud security, compliance auditing, and executive risk advisory, this post explores how Secure Research Environments (SREs) leverage security controls and architectural patterns to support alignment with multiple compliance frameworks. It highlights how automation and standardized design can streamline access to regulated research environments, while emphasizing that final compliance outcomes depend on organizational implementation, configuration, and formal assessment.
When compliance becomes a barrier to discovery
Right now, your researchers face a perfect storm. Compliance standards are changing rapidly while grant funding is becoming increasingly scarce.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a mandate requiring NIST SP 800-171 for all controlled-access biomedical data repositories. Organizations that handle Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) now require Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0. Without it, your institution can’t apply for federal-based research grants, limiting your access to federal funding opportunities. Additional US agencies are following suit. Internationally, your organization must demonstrate compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ISO 27001 when handling sensitive information. Canada and the United Kingdom enforce their own data privacy regulations.
As compliance requirements expand, so do the costs of meeting them. And these challenges can have downstream effects across your institution. If your institution can’t secure funding from limited resources, you can’t expand your research footprint. For universities, this could affect R1 status or growth trajectory. For national labs, research hospitals, and defense contractors, it means losing competitive positioning for critical grants and the ability to attract top talent.
Beyond competitive standing, noncompliance carries regulatory and financial risks. False claims violations can result in significant fines, and data spillage involving CUI might carry additional penalties.
Address multiple compliance frameworks with one preconfigured solution
The SRE on AWS helps you address these challenges by providing your institution with a robust, more secure foundation for processing sensitive, protected, and sovereign workloads. In the US, this includes NIST SP 800-172, CMMC, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and many more. Internationally, the SRE supports GDPR, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), ISO 27001, and other frameworks.
The SRE establishes a centralized environment, meaning your research, IT, and organizational support teams can provide thorough support to your researchers across disciplines while maintaining compliance with funding agencies’ requirements and regulations. AWS delivers this through a preconfigured multi-account architecture that meets essential compliance requirements.
Your research organization can deploy the solution in under 3 months (sometimes as little as 1 week for single frameworks) at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premises approaches, which require significant capital investment and often leave researchers waiting or resorting to workaround solutions that might not meet compliance requirements.
Under the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS maintains the technical foundation, infrastructure security, automated security controls, and preventive guardrails. Your institution manages its data, policies, and documentation requirements, with support from step-by-step guides and training materials provided by AWS. For your IT teams, this centralized approach alleviates the burden of managing multiple one-off compliance environments and responding to those last-minute requests from researchers.
How the SRE architecture automates compliance
The SRE is built using the Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS (LZA), which automates the deployment of a more secure, resilient, scalable cloud foundation. Depending on your institution’s requirements, the SRE can be deployed on AWS GovCloud (US), commercially, or both.
Figure 1 illustrates the architecture, including AWS Organizations with a multi-account structure, centralized identity and access management (IAM), centralized logging and monitoring, a segmented network with traffic inspection, and centralized DNS management. Within this foundation, the SRE creates separate compliance buckets called organizational units for different regulatory requirements. When your researcher wins a grant, they work with your IT department to identify which compliance standards apply. IT places the researcher into the appropriate bucket: HIPAA for health research, CMMC for defense projects, FISMA for federal work, and so on. Researchers working on multiple grants with different compliance requirements can access multiple buckets simultaneously, with each project automatically inheriting the correct controls.
When your researchers spin up services inside their bucket, they naturally inherit the appropriate security and compliance controls, which means they can meet required standards and conduct their research more securely without additional configuration.
Figure 1: Overview of the SRE Landing Zone architecture on AWS illustrating organizational units for different compliance frameworks
Scale and adapt as your compliance needs evolve
As your institutional needs evolve, your IT team can quickly add new compliance buckets or expand existing ones without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch. When compliance requirements change, you can update your SRE configurations rather than starting over, protecting your investment and maintaining continuous grant eligibility. This helps your SRE scale in line with your research ambitions.
Additionally, for organizations with heightened data protection requirements beyond standard compliance frameworks, the SRE can be extended with a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) on AWS. This adds an additional security layer at the data level for fine-grained control over data ingress and egress.
Give your researchers a seamless compliance experience
Although the SRE handles infrastructure-level compliance, your researchers experience something much more streamlined. From your researchers’ perspective, compliance happens behind the scenes. They don’t need to understand HIPAA requirements or configure security settings. They log in to their more secure research portal, a customized interface that shows only the products and services relevant to their specific grant. They focus on their research while compliance controls work automatically in the background. The portal serves as the primary access point for your researchers and their external partners, streamlining collaboration while maintaining strict compliance standards.
This streamlined approach gives your researchers what they need while helping avoid common institutional headaches such as shadow IT environments, unauthorized server purchases, and last-minute scrambles to provision compliant resources.
Extending secure research globally
Research institutions worldwide face the same core challenge: meeting rigorous compliance requirements without slowing down scientific discovery. The AWS SRE is built on a flexible, multi-account architecture that can be configured to reflect the regulatory requirements of any jurisdiction, whether your institution operates under a single national framework or navigates overlapping international standards. The SRE provides a consistent, scalable foundation that travels with your research mission.
Get started with alignment and deployment
Successful SRE implementation starts with organizational alignment. Your chief information officer (CIO), vice president of research, and chief information security officer (CISO) must work together from the outset to support your researchers’ compliance needs. You can be successful if you bring these leaders together early with a shared commitment to helping your researchers and aligning on what’s needed to succeed before implementation begins.
After that foundation is in place, each SRE implementation includes two major workstreams that run in parallel. By building infrastructure and preparing compliance documentation simultaneously, you close the months-long gap between technical completion and audit readiness that frequently stalls deployment. The two parallel workstreams are:
- Technical build – Deploy infrastructure, including AWS Organizations, organizational units, network architecture, security controls, and automation using the LZA.
- Compliance and audit readiness – AWS Security Assurance Services prepares you for certification by providing documentation, control mapping, and evidence collection.
AWS offers three flexible pathways for deployment:
- AWS Partners and Security Assurance Services – AWS Partners handle technical deployment, and Security Assurance Services prepares you for compliance certifications. Best for institutions seeking expert implementation support. AWS Partners can maintain your environment or teach your team to manage it independently. To get started, explore the AWS Partner Network to find an experienced partner.
- Guided build and Security Assurance Services – Your team builds the SRE with guidance from AWS solutions architects while Security Assurance Services handles compliance. Best for institutions seeking to develop internal expertise and gain deep knowledge for independent management and scaling. To get started, review the LZA implementation guide and connect with your AWS account team.
- AWS Professional Services and Security Assurance Services – AWS Professional Services builds your environment and Security Assurance Services handles compliance. Best for institutions seeking AWS engagement with full-service implementation. To get started, contact AWS Professional Services to scope your engagement.
Is your institution ready to gain an edge in competing for grants?
With the SRE, your IT team can take a centralized, automated approach to research compliance, your researchers can stay focused on their work, and your institution can stay positioned to win grants. Review the deployment pathways to find the right approach for your institution or visit the documentation on the LZA (the technical foundation of the SRE), AWS Partner Network, and AWS Professional Services.
You can also take the next step by contacting AWS directly to learn more about building your SRE.
Read related stories on the AWS Public Sector Blog
- Building Trusted Research Environments on AWS
- Data ingress and egress through Trusted Research Environments and other secure enclaves
- Unlocking research potential: How the University of Sheffield and RONIN accelerate secure research through Data Connect
- 4 best practices to enhance research IT operations with AWS