Carol Collins
The Federal Risk and Management Program has granted the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard an authority to operate the cloud-based platform it developed in collaboration with Microsoft and Verily.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research organization said Monday the Terra cloud-native tool is meant for use in biomedical research to access data and conduct analysis operations, and the platform’s FedRAMP moderate-level certification was specifically given to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
Through the FedRAMP authorization, federal agencies and initiatives funded by the federal government can now use Terra for storage and analysis purposes, and manage research projects whose data are available on the same cloud platform.
Other programs under the National Institutes of Health have been using Terra through the authorizations from the Federal Information Security Modernization Act.
NIH’s Terra-user entities include the All of Us Research Program; Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization and Informatics Lab-space of the National Human Genome Research Institute; BioDataCatalyst of the NHLBI; and the National Cancer Institute.
David Bernick, chief information security officer at the Broad Institute, commented on FedRAMP’s multiple-audit approach and security assessment process. “This certification establishes that we have an active and robust security program,” he added.
