The Health Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, has deployed its secure and compliant Cloud solution, Sherlock Cloud, in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This solution addresses the gap that currently exists in infrastructure level compliance offered by public cloud platforms with a comprehensive, managed compliance capability offered by Sherlock Cloud, thereby giving customers the option of buying services on premise (@SDSC) or in the Cloud (@AWS). The initial set of managed services focuses on meeting the NIST Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and HIPAA requirements.
With this new capability SDSC becomes one of the few academic institutions to offer secure, compliant, managed services through a Hybrid Cloud leveraging both a private Cloud (@SDSC) and a public Cloud platform (@AWS).
While public Clouds offer great scale, elasticity, and automation, their basic infrastructure does not adequately secure and protect sensitive data. SDSC’s Health CI team recognized that additional services needed to be developed on top of this basic infrastructure to fully realize the potential of Cloud platforms. In an effort to capitalize on its specialized compliant-managed services capability, the Health CI Division collaborated with AWS Professional Services earlier this year to design and deploy a comprehensive managed solution that would encompass the benefits offered by both organizations, namely scalability, cost-effectiveness, and end-to-end compliance capability.
“Researchers are required to meet various federal compliance regulations while working with protected data (NIST CUI, HIPAA, etc.) and they’re looking for affordable services that meet this need,” said Sandeep Chandra, Executive Director of Sherlock Cloud. “As expected, there is a natural inclination to explore Cloud services. However, public Clouds only offer basic compliance at the infrastructure level, and significant effort, both in terms of technical resources and capital, needs to be invested to build additional services to make the environment fully compliant. The gap between what is offered by public Clouds and what is required from a compliance standpoint is often misunderstood. Sherlock Cloud addresses the gap, eliminates the guesswork of compliance, and provides its customers with the ultimate compliant solution.”
Sherlock will introduce these new services to their existing partners starting this month and make them available to the larger academic and research communities, government agencies and industry partners. “SDSC has made significant investments in building this capability, and these communities are invited to partner with Sherlock Cloud to meet their compliance and protected data management needs,” said Chandra.
