- Home>
- Case studies
The IBBL Trusted Third Party (TTP) Application Project
The security stakes, a key decision factor addressed by ebrc’s Trusted Cloud
The decision was clear: a cloud meeting the security criteria through a mutualised environment was obviously the best choice for this project. All the above arguments led to this economical and dynamic platform.
The ebrc Trusted Cloud was the best choice and it’s been confirmed today throughout the operational phase.
Benefits
In the frame of the government policy aiming at developing the biotechnology sector, the Luxembourgish State initiated the launch of the Integrated Biobank Luxembourg (IBBL).
Amongst its activities, the IBBL deals as an intermediary between the actors of the Health sector and the world of Research. This position requires the ability to supply the biotechnology research sector with samples and associated data whilst guaranteeing donors and patients full confidentiality and respect of their privacy.
Therefore, the IBBL, wanting to ensure both the availability and richness of the information delivered to Research and the highest level of confidentiality, set model in which data and identities are dissociated with up a strict security controls.
Dealing as an interface between Healthcare and citizens, this project is a win-win model.
The research collects samples and the citizens could benefit from specific medication, resulting from research. That’s the beginning of a new age for personalised medicine.
Objectives and constraints
The project implemented together with our Client IBBL focused on flexibility and dynamism at every step. As for the IBBL, they wanted to carry out their core business while entrusting a third party with the responsibility of implementing their project. This also included the full management of the platform throughout the operational phase.
From the very beginning, an environment has been designed with the major objectives of flexibility, high availability, security and scalability. A functional analysis determined the required operating environment and highlighted the evolutions to be taken into account.
In order to be able to carry out these future developments, the global environment architecture had to allow large and rapid extensions whilst maintaining high levels of availability at all times including during any changes.
Quite rapidly the ideal architecture showed the need for specific environments in order to support the project. Therefore the decision was made to deploy the following environments:
– testing
– development
– production
– pre-production
Together with the Client, the choice was made to base their architecture on a private cloud.
Since ebrc, acting as a trusted third party, covers the entire chain of events, it positions itself in a cloud-based Business Process Outsourcing model, i.e. at a Private Cloud/SaaS level.
Moreover, as ebrc builds on remote and interconnected Data Centres, the Cloud solution deployment has been implemented to maximise these key advantages. ebrc uses storage and processing environments spread out across two Tier IV classified Data Centres, thus increasing dramatically the operational reliability.
Nowadays in this private cloud, ebrc acts as a pivot for the IBBL. The technical management integrated through the cloud as well as the functional operations are carried out and implemented on behalf of a fully satisfied Client.
Functional objectives and expectations
The IBBL has a specific position in the Luxembourgish market and differs from traditional biobanks.
The IBBL plays the role of the research facilitator in offering the research sector whole sets of samples and associated data, which are de-identified for the research community, but which can be re-identified through a comprehensive and highly secured system of pseudonyms should that be required.
But more importantly, this approach allows the associated data to be updated with new clinical information as it becomes available to make the samples as valuable as possible for research.
The possibility of re-identification of donors and patients, under strictly controlled rules and subject to the approval of the relevant Ethics Committee, allows clinically useful discoveries to be communicated to the treating physicians who may use such information in selecting the most appropriate new tests and treatments.
The interactions between identities and saved data require therefore a unique and highly secure environment, managed by a trusted third party. This is the role played by ebrc in this key project in the Luxembourgish arena.
Cloud efficiency
As described above, the TTP Project is running in a private Cloud environment. This virtualised architecture offers dedicated platforms like test, production, development and user acceptance.
All these elements are integrated, permanently supervised and controlled through automated processes. The console supervising the Cloud activates or deactivates the components following rules defined to assume permanent fail-over functionality.
All the actions are predefined and benefit from the organisation defined in the working templates. So, another great advantage of this architecture appears within the lifecycle of such a project. It’s easy and fast to create a new User acceptance test environment before running it. In a traditional model, such an operation would have required much effort.
All the actions detected through monitoring functionalities are automatically identified and routed to our service desk. The entire platform is secured and accesses are controlled with mutualised components.
Data is secured and saved with integrated Cloud backup.
To deliver this entire infrastructure within the best in class efficiency model, ebrc provides an integrated multi-site Cloud infrastructure. This dedicated private Cloud by ebrc is located in two Tier IV certified Data Centres.
With this advantage, we offer the IBBL remote mirroring for the servers and storage. Within this infrastructure, the IBBL benefits and takes advantage from a full redundant maximised architecture along the complete value chain, putting fail-over and flexibility at the top of efficiency.
Why choose the Cloud ?
A whole series of comparisons, based on the key arguments, led to this choice.
(*) Grades from 1 being the simplest to 5, being the most complex.
| Theme | Traditional Model (*) | Cloud (*) |
| Systems Organisation | 3 | 1 |
| Automated systems fail-over | 5 | 1 |
| Ease of implementation | 3 | 1 |
| Ease of extensions | 3 | 1 |
| Ease of deploying new versions/releases | 4 | 1 |
| Cost of the initial architecture | 5 | 1 |
| Cost of initial services | 4 | 2 |
| Cost of operational services | 4 | 2 |
| Monitoring and industrialisation of processes on the full platform | 4 | 2 |
The decision was clear: a cloud meeting the security criteria through a mutualised environment was obviously the best choice for this project. All the above arguments led to this economical and dynamic platform. The Cloud was the best choice and it’s been confirmed today through the operational phase.
