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Secure cloud computing for genomic data

Nature Biotechnology volume 34, pages 588–591 (2016)Cite this article

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A Corrigendum to this article was published on 11 October 2016

This article has been updated

To the Editor:

The 'cloud' offers scalable and competitively priced computing resources for the analysis and storage of data from large-scale genomics studies, but it must also ensure that human subject data are hosted in a context that is both secure and compliant with regulations. Concerns continue to surface in recent years regarding potential hacking and potential loss of patient privacy of data held within the cloud1,2,3. Security challenges for human genomics research in the cloud include researcher's and administrator's lack of familiarity with security features and inconsistent guidelines from different regulatory bodies for genomic datasets. These inconsistencies can cause confusion as to whether or not security requirements are being met on cloud for a particular human dataset. Ultimately, if a research environment in the cloud is not compliant with regulatory guidelines, this could mean that an investigator might lose access to a dataset. Here, we lay out a set of cloud security guidelines that meet a wide range of regulatory requirements. Our intent is twofold: first, to raise awareness regarding the variability and complexity of current guidelines; and second, to highlight how redundant security assessments that are currently carried out dataset by dataset in the cloud could be replaced by a 'do-once, use-many-times' framework. We envision that the do-once, use-many-times guidelines provided here will help researchers navigate various cloud solution providers and will ultimately yield savings in costs, time and staffing. Although the cloud technology stack will continue to evolve rapidly, which in turn will change the specifics of solution implementation, we believe that the security requirements presented here will be applicable for the foreseeable future.

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Figure 1: Security stack.

Change history

  • 11 August 2016

    In the version of this article initially published, the competing financial interests line should have been positive in the HTML as it was in the PDF (“The authors declare competing financial interests”). The statement “M.S. is a co-founder of Personalis and SensOmics and a member of the scientific advisory boards of Personalis, SensOmics and Genapsys” should also have appeared in the HTML. The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA

    Somalee Datta, Keith Bettinger & Michael Snyder

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  1. Somalee Datta
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  2. Keith Bettinger
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  3. Michael Snyder
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Correspondence to Somalee Datta.

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Competing interests

M.S. is a co-founder of Personalis and SensOmics and a member of the scientific advisory boards of Personalis, SensOmics and Genapsys.

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Editor's note: This article has been peer reviewed.

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Datta, S., Bettinger, K. & Snyder, M. Secure cloud computing for genomic data. Nat Biotechnol 34, 588–591 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3496

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