Soteria at the University of Arizona is a secure data and analysis enclave for conducting research with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) data. The Soteria environment is committed to providing a secure managed data and analysis enclave that is HIPAA compliant and easily accessible.
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The Soteria platform is comprised of multiple well known, cutting-edge web based tools: Soteria HPC, External Data Transfer, Posit Connect Health, and CyVerse Health. Collectively, the resources and tools ensure that protected data remains secure through the lifecycle of interdisciplinary research projects in Soteria. The built-in research tools—some of which are developed at UArizona—are exclusively offered only to UArizona researchers making the platform uniquely customized for the research needs of the UArizona campus community. All services and tools provided as part of Soteria are protected from the public internet and can only be accessed through a dedicated VPN connection. This allows researchers to work from anywhere using their own devices once they are granted access to the VPN.
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Unified and secure enclaves like Soteria have been established to accelerate research and collaboration and takes inspiration from efforts such as the NIH NC3 (National COVID Cohort Collaborative)(link is external) that allows healthcare providers, public health experts and epidemiologists to collaborate and draw conclusions at a speed previously inaccessible to researchers (link is external). With access to multiple sources of PII and PHI, UArizona researchers can perform similarly groundbreaking research via Soteria.
- With funding support from the University of Arizona Health Sciences 5.3 Strategic Initiatives plan, the University of Arizona Data Science Institute, University of Arizona Information Technology Services, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics and CyVerse have joined forces to bring big data science techniques and capabilities to biomedical research.