16 Apr INFN EPIC: a certified and secure cloud for biomedical data

Ensuring a secure, accessible, and confidential environment for biomedical data, while simultaneously guaranteeing data sovereignty and compliance with European Union principles and regulations: this is the purpose of the INFN EPIC Cloud infrastructure.

What is EPIC Cloud

EPIC (Enhanced PrIvacy and Compliance) Cloud is a region of the INFN cloud optimized for medical research applications. It is a certified and secure cloud service, developed and managed to meet the requirements of projects and experiments involving clinical, biomedical, and genomic data.

Although it has primarily been used for research projects and collaborations to date, the high Technology Readiness Level achieved by EPIC Cloud, combined with its specific focus on data privacy management, makes it suitable for use within public-private partnerships and technology transfer. Consequently, it is also available for use by entities external to INFN.

The structure of EPIC Cloud

Beyond hardware resources, the main feature of EPIC Cloud is its focus on information security. The service is managed through an Information Security Management System (ISMS) certified to ISO/IEC 27001, with the addition of ISO/IEC 27017 controls specific to cloud data security and ISO/IEC 27018 for the management of personal information in the cloud. Compliance with these three standards ensures that data and services are adequately protected and secure, making EPIC the perfect platform for managing highly confidential and sensitive data, such as that of private companies or healthcare providers.

Through the EPIC infrastructure, INFN leverages years of experience in managing vast amounts of data from fundamental physics experiments and applies it to life sciences and medicine. The EPIC cloud comprises three sites—Bologna, Bari, and Catania—which collectively provide 16.5 petabytes of storage space, 14,712 CPU cores, and 62 GPUs.

Target audience

There are more than one hundred active users of EPIC. Critical use cases supported by EPIC Cloud include the Health Big Data project, which aims to create a secure data lake for Italian medical research; BOSCO, the computational genomics platform coordinated by the S. Orsola Hospital in Bologna; and the platform for the DARE project, linked to the European Virtual Human Twin initiative for preventive and precision medicine.

With EPIC, INFN has developed a multi-site, open-source, interoperable, dynamic, and secure cloud that provides tools for:

• computational genomics, aimed at collecting data from DNA sequencers;
• the training and use of AI algorithms;
• the management of medical imaging data for diagnostics, nuclear medicine, and radiotherapy;
• precision medicine and the European Virtual Human Twin;
• Virtual Imaging Trials (VIT) and in-silico medicine in general.

The platform is connected to similar European initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud, aligned with the European regulation for health data spaces, and open to public-private partnerships.

How it works

EPIC Cloud is based on the same technologies as INFN DataCloud. To use EPIC Cloud, it is necessary to have a collaboration agreement in place with INFN (collaborative research, commissioned research, service contract, partnership on a project funded by INFN, or by external funds).

Contact us if you would like to learn more about how Epic works or if you are interested in accessing the service.