Unlocking research potential: How the University of Sheffield and RONIN accelerate secure research through Data Connect

In today’s academic research landscape, research leadership teams must protect high-value research assets in an era where cyber threats are escalating and traditional security measures no longer suffice. Funding bodies—like national research councils, governmental entities, international organizations, and private foundations—continue to establish diverse domestic and international data protection regulations, such as the United States’ Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Australian government’s Information Security Manual (ISM), and the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 27001 for information security management. These regulations mandate that research organizations adhere to secure research environments. For researchers, navigating changing data governance structures introduces significant complexity, and takes away from their time conducting research. This is especially true if researchers don’t know what data they’ll need to address their research questions.

In the United Kingdom (UK), National Health Services (NHS) Trust leaders and UK university research administrators find themselves at the epicenter of a data security storm. With the NHS hosting one of the world’s largest health and social care datasets and universities conducting cutting-edge research using health data, these institutions face the daunting task of safeguarding highly sensitive patient data and valuable intellectual property. Protecting this sensitive health information has never been more complex—or more critical.

This blog explores how the University of Sheffield uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner RONIN Core and RONIN Isolate solutions to deliver a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) built on AWS infrastructure, enabling secure research and collaboration with sensitive data through the university’s Data Connect service. Secure and compliant infrastructure is essential for sensitive research. Many research institutions use a research Landing Zone to build Secure Research Environments (SRE) that provide the foundational compliance infrastructure—meeting standards like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) NIST 800-171, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and CMMC—upon which TREs like RONIN can build secure research workflows.

The challenge: Aligning research streams into a centralized, certified, and secure research environment

In late 2021, the University of Sheffield’s research innovation and technology department leaders identified the need for a centralized, secure, and compliant platform to enable their researchers to conduct sensitive data-driven research. The university had identified several bespoke research streams, including work with government, manufacturing, and health data. While there wasn’t a single compelling event requiring a new cybersecurity approach, research IT leaders were inundated with questions from researchers asking where they could store data, what data they could access, and whether the data environment would meet their governance requirements. They needed to reduce duplication and streamline efforts.

Recognizing the growth of importance, and opportunity, for Sheffield to raise its profile by hosting NHS data, Sheffield’s research IT team sought to build a TRE that met the compliance requirements for ISO27001 certified research, and adhered to the Standard Architecture for Trusted Research Environment (SATRE) framework, which synthesizes knowledge and best practices from various institutions and sectors across the UK. This comprehensive framework encompasses all aspects of TRE provision—including information governance procedures, computing technology, data management, and other essential capabilities—to enable a robust and standardized approach to secure research environments.

The university chose to work with RONIN to build TRE and non-TRE research environments that could scale research computing environments on-demand, manage budgets and cost controls transparently, and deliver simple and secure data analysis and data management. RONIN’s TRE controls data access and researcher workflows, and its deployment on AWS enables compliance inheritability from underlying infrastructure, such as ISO 27001 and NIST 800-171 when properly configured.

As Saul Cozens, head of product for research and innovation IT, said, Sheffield wanted the “technology handled so researchers can do the research.” The knowledge that RONIN was built on AWS gave them confidence that they could rely on AWS’s global infrastructure for security. RONIN’s tiered environments (Core and Isolate) provide flexibility for different security requirements, and can adapt to evolving compliance standards. RONIN also offers easy scaling of resources, as demand for access to Sheffield’s data services increases.

Enabling research acceleration and impact through Data Connect

Prior to the implementation of Data Connect, the university lacked an easily accessible environment where researchers could securely access and process health and social care data from different providers. Researchers were spending up to 75 percent of their grant time trying to access the required data, which significantly hindered their research output. Established in 2024, Data Connect facilitates research using health and social care data, and offers a more efficient process for researchers to obtain the necessary approvals and data access agreements, addressing a major pain point. Data Connect allows researchers to focus on analysis rather than data wrangling.

“Governance is a big and critical issue. Often, researchers don’t know where to go to get their data from… Information available on NHS can be difficult to decipher, even for the university, in what type of ethics they need, where you can store it, how you work with it, what is Personally Identifiable Information (PII)/pseudo data.”

– Dr. Rosemarie E. Gough, senior research project manager at Data Connect

Data Connect also offers valuable technical expertise to support researchers. For data assets like the CUREd+ research database, which consolidates information from different health services in the Urgent and Emergency Health Care system in England, the service helps clean, link, and prepare complex health datasets for research use, translating researchers’ needs into appropriate data extracts and queries. This technical support allows researchers to focus on their area of expertise, the analysis and interpretation of the data, rather than getting bogged down in the time-consuming and often challenging task of data preparation. The Data Connect team’s ability to handle the technical aspects of data management has been a significant value-add for the university’s researchers.

RONIN and AWS provide a self-service and secure platform for researchers to access and analyze sensitive health data. The platform enables collaboration across institutions while maintaining data security and governance. While few research projects require isolated environments currently, the Data Connect team are preparing for more users moving into the isolated environment as the NHS transitions towards Secure Data Environments as the default way to access NHS data for research and other secondary uses.

University leaders report increased research outputs and publications using the platform, and say that researchers have found the system to be user-friendly and intuitive, reducing the bureaucratic burden they previously faced. The holistic approach provided by Data Connect, where the service “just works” for users, has been well received. Researchers can now focus on their research rather than navigating complex data access and governance processes.

Data Connect as a foundation for future growth

Data Connect’s platform for building and sharing unique datasets has led to an explosion of health data research at the University of Sheffield. Recognizing the opportunity to address skills gaps and help researchers effectively utilize large, complex health datasets, Data Connect has started to invest in researcher training on data analytics, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence for researchers.

The University of Sheffield’s implementation of the Data Connect program, built on RONIN solutions, has been a strategic success for the university. The growing demand for the service has led to plans for team expansion, indicating a long-term, strategic commitment to this initiative. The university has reduced the duplication of effort across different research groups, enabling a more efficient and cost-effective model and achieving cost recovery within the first year. By creating a centralized, certified, and secure Trusted Research Environment, the university has addressed the needs of its diverse research community, streamlined data access and governance, and provided valuable technical support.

This case study serves as a lighthouse example for other universities within the UK and beyond, demonstrating the potential of leveraging cloud-based solutions to unlock research potential and drive meaningful outcomes. Visit the RONIN Isolate page on AWS Marketplace to learn more about how your organization can support self-service research with protected information on AWS.