Health: Data ingestion capacities and data services for the European Genomic Data Infrastructure in the European Health Data Space: data storage and processing capacity

Expected Outcome

• 1+MG data storage strategy.
• Secure federated data storage and processing capacity for 1+MG data infrastructure.

Objective

This action contributes to boosting the capacity of Member States to sequence human genomes through scaling up dedicated secure data storage and processing environments. Data volume is crucial in genomics analytics, and efficient storage and management of large data sets, such as genomics, is essential; to ensure efficient processing, genomic data storage solutions should be flexible and scale with needs. Genomic data, once curated, must not only be stored safely, but also be processed in secure processing environments, which is a particular challenge with the highly voluminous genomic data.

This action relates to the potential creation of a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium for genomic data (Genome EDIC) and supports the activities related to operating the 1+MG data infrastructure established with the support of Digital Europe under Work Programme 2021-2022 (GDI project), including its alignment with the requirements, technical specifications, and processes established by the EHDS Regulation to ensure a smooth functioning within the HealthData@EU infrastructure. As part of the 1+MG initiative implementation, this action builds on the outputs and results of the 1+MG implementing projects, and will establish a collaboration agreement with the Genome of Europe (GoE project, supported under Digital Europe Work Programme 2022-2023), to contribute ensuring safe storage and processing capacity for the European reference genome data within the 1+MG data infrastructure.

Scope

This action supports the acquisition and set-up of a secure federated data storage and processing capacity for the 1+MG data infrastructure, which is expected to be operated by the relevant EDIC. It should include “hot storage” working in synergy with secure processing environments aligned with the EHDS requirements, such as compliance checks for secure processing environments and detached long-term storage for curated data made available to the 1+MG by the data providers, including the Genome of Europe dataset. The data storage capacity should be designed based on an agreed data storage optimisation strategy, and balancing between storage costs and data depth/breadth/versioning while considering the most appropriate data storage architecture, technology and legal aspects, and ensuring scalability.