About Regulated Data (ReD) Environment

Purpose and Scope

Beyond compliance, the ReD Environment provides robust support for data analytics and computational studies involving regulated data. Its secure cloud enclave delivers access to essential research computing resources, including:

• Compute
• Storage
• Scientific Software
• Data Analytics Tools

These resources are hosted in an environment compliant with the following standards:

• FISMA-moderate (NIST 800-53)
• Controlled Unclassified Information (NIST 800-171)
• CMS ARS 3.1
• Harvard Data Safety Level 4

By the end of 2025, the ReD Environment aims to achieve compliance with CMMC Level 2 as well.

Computing Platforms

The ReD Environment leverages "AWS-only" infrastructure and provides two primary platforms for researchers:

1. AWS Research Engineering Studio

Provides a virtual desktop environment and application hosting. This is great for those researchers accustomed to a Windows Remote Desktop and associated applications. Within Service Workbench the ReD Team can create custom workspaces that launch specific instances (cores, memory, GPUs) with specific OS images and software

2. AWS ParallelCluster & Open OnDemand

Provides a scale out high-performance computing environment with a web front end through Open OnDemand and SLURM batch processing scheduler. Each Principal Investigator (PI) and/or project will have its own dedicated partition(s) that can be customized for the specific technology (instance type, cores, memory, GPUs) needs and capacity limits for that PI/project. Data storage is presented to the ParallelCluster as POSIX filesystem with access controls at the project level and is backed by S3.

Additional Services

The ReD Environment also supports other research needs through case-by-case provisioning of:

• Code Repositories
• Databases
• Persistent Virtual Machines

Typical data analytics software is availble:

• Julia, Jupyter Notebooks, Python, R, RStudio, SAS, Stata, SAS, R, RStudio, and VS Code.

Additional tools are availble:

• git, LibreOffice, VS Code,

Requests for additional software and tools may be made at regulated_data_environment@harvard.edu.

For researchers working on specific tasks, such as reviewing or editing sensitive documentation, the ReD Environment can provide compliant ad hoc workspaces tailored to their needs.

Enabling World-Class Research

By offering a secure, compliant, and scalable platform, the Regulated Data Environment empowers researchers to pursue innovative studies involving sensitive data. For more information or to request services, please contact the ReD team at regulated_data_environment@harvard.edu.