Safe Collections and Stewardship on Cloud Kotta

The increasing collection and use of sensitive datasets in science, coupled with the need for inter-institutional collaboration, poses new challenges for infrastructure and administrative models. While enclaves, such as CLOUD KOTTA, provide for the secure management and analysis of data, they do not yet support the administrative models needed by today's researcher practices. Current approaches often rely on a single data administrator to be responsible for the research activities of multiple analysts. However, this approach is not scalable and is prone to errors. To address these challenges we introduce two new abstractions in CLOUD KOTTA: 'safe collections' and 'stewardship'. Safe-collections define a novel abstraction that refines the scope of a data-store and the policies tied to it. Stewards are a new class of privileged user who own and manage safe-collections. By introducing these abstractions, our aim is to relieve the tension between limiting access to, and promoting research on, sensitive data.