Picking the right workspace for your needs.
Digital workspaces can provide secure, collaborative, remote environments that allow your team to work together and share data. They can provide you with resources that may not be available in your existing infrastructure – such as analytics pipelines, data, or specialised compute.
Some workspaces can be configured for secure remote access with limited connectivity to the internet, allowing for your data to be securely held and processed by multiple individuals. This access is often facilitated using technologies like virtual private networks and remote desktop or proprietary web applications.
However, with a complex multitude of workspace offerings available, selecting the right partner can quickly complex and difficult process.
Many workspaces are designed for simple, straight forward projects with low-risk data. But when faced with big data projects with strict ethical and regulatory governance, compatibility with the necessary tool and analytics software can be poor. This will drastically limit the types of analysis your team can perform.
Providing flexible user-configurable workspaces risks inadvertently allowing bad actors or ransomware groups access to your systems and data via supply chain attacks. Therefore, whilst these locked down environments are essential for compliance and data governance, they often frustrate staff, collaborators, and customers as they’re unable to access new modern tools and data processing packages.
This ‘one-size fits all’ model scales poorly to large collaborative big data projects containing high-value data where data analysis and management strategies can be a fluid and evolving picture.
Introducing Hybrid Workspaces
Biodev’s Hybrid Workspaces can be deployed in compatible local compute environments or with all major cloud platforms. Our workspace environments can be configured to span cloud and local networks for maximum flexibility and are designed to avoid being locked into a specific cloud vendor. We support various modalities for connecting to your data including remote desktop, web applications, transfer protocols, and API driven access to modern workflow engines.
Our workspaces allow you to offer the right level of access and support for your internal teams and collaborators based upon their technical abilities whilst balancing their needs against data security and governance.
Our Hybrid Workspaces come supplied with a number of pre-configured data processing VM templates and libraries of popular data processing pipelines which meet the requirements of most complex life-science projects. However, our team can rapidly validate, risk assess, and implement requests for additional workflows. This when combined with our compartmentalised deployment model mitigates the risk of supply chain attacks whilst allowing your team access to modern data analytic packages.
Additional features include:
- Seamless connectivity between your local and cloud environments
- Granular Role Based Access Controls
- Multi-factor authentication and federated sign-ons
- Secure pre-configured templates for common workflows
- Secure templates offering mixture of paid (SPSS, Matlab, Office 365) or equivalent open source tooling
- Containerisation support for complex workflows
- Support workflow engines like Nextflow, Snakemake, CWL etc
- Cost control on cloud deployments & managed scalable compute instances
- Support across multiple cloud partners
We can also design bespoke workflows and architectures which are ‘made-to-measure’ for your project. To find out more, reach out to arrange a consultation with our team!