Sherlock Launches Secure, Compliant Cloud Services in Amazon Web Services

Published June 29, 2017

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.

About SDSC’s Health Cyberinfrastructure Division

SDSC’s Health Cyberinfrastructure Division focuses on providing innovative and secure information technology and data services for a wide range of initiatives for the UC system, academia, state and federal government agencies and industry partners. It is an SDSC Center of Excellence for secure HIPAA- and FISMA-compliant managed cloud hosting, and has recently added NIST CUI and CSF compliant services to its repertoire. Launched under the brand Sherlock, its services provide a secure foundation for a wide range of initiatives. The Health CI Division supports a variety of entities including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and University of California Systems. For more information, please visit http://sherlock.sdsc.edu.

About Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

For more information, please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/.

About SDSC

As an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, SDSC is considered a leader in data-intensive computing and cyberinfrastructure, providing resources, services, and expertise to the national research community, including industry and academia. Cyberinfrastructure refers to an accessible, integrated network of computer-based resources and expertise, focused on accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery. SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT. SDSC’s petascale Comet supercomputer continues to be a key resource within the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program, the most advanced collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world.