Project Name:

Secure Compute Environment Scan

Contractor: Duality Technologies

Lessons Learned

  • There was high awareness and excitement for the NSDS across the federal statistical community, but interview subjects outside of the federal statistical community had less awareness but were intrigued by the concept of a potential NSDS.
  • The federal statistical community is generally excited about the NSDS due to the prospect of doing more with more data, at lower cost with lower administrative burdens.
  • Several of the larger federal statistical data agencies (ex: Census, BEA, etc.) had recent relevant experience with secure data computing, and the general feedback is that policy support is needed to enable acceptance of Secure Computing Environments to host and process sensitive data.
  • Many of the smaller federal statistical agencies with smaller budgets and fewer staff members are currently hindered in their day-to-day work by administrative overhead, including the need for extensive MOUs and other similar agreements to access and collaborate on data. There was excitement that policy acceptance of the NSDS would hopefully greatly reduce the costly administrative burdens.

This project has solicited feedback on the current landscape of secure compute environments (SCEs) in the federal government and ideas for future build outs of SCEs. A summary of some of this feedback is below.

  • The majority of current or potential Secure Compute Environment (SCE) users have data scale and computing latency requirements that could be addressed by secure computing platforms available on select commercial cloud environments.
  • The majority of current or potential SCE users at federal statistical agencies have common security requirements driven by CIPSEA regulations.
  • A subset of SCE users has restrictive requirements driven by national security concerns.
  • Smaller federal statistical agencies are currently hindered by establishing data sharing agreements and MOUs which are needed to access and collaborate on data in a secure compute environment.
  • The majority of existing SCE users are proficient in the use of computing tools and would be ready to adopt alternative SCE platforms.

 

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Disclaimer: America’s DataHub Consortium (ADC), a public-private partnership, implements research opportunities that support the strategic objectives of the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). These results document research funded through ADC and is being shared to inform interested parties of ongoing activities and to encourage further discussion. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed above do not necessarily reflect the views of NCSES or NSF. Please send questions to ncsesweb@nsf.gov.