Research across Europe increasingly depends on the ability to access, combine and analyse sensitive and controlled data across institutional, national and disciplinary boundaries. Health and genomic data, socio-economic and administrative data, commercially sensitive information and other controlled datasets have enormous potential for research and innovation, but cannot simply be made openly available. Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and Secure Processing Environments provide an important response to this challenge by enabling researchers to analyse sensitive data within appropriately controlled environments.
However, Europe currently has a diverse landscape of TREs developed by national infrastructures, research organisations and disciplinary communities. While this diversity reflects legitimate differences in legal frameworks, research requirements and institutional contexts, it also creates fragmentation. Researchers may encounter different access mechanisms and technical environments, while providers face challenges in supporting cross-border and cross-infrastructure research. The next challenge is therefore not simply to build more TREs, but to enable existing environments to work together as part of a sustainable European research data ecosystem.
EOSC-ENTRUST – the European Network of TRUSTed Research Environments – addresses this challenge by bringing together research communities, operational TRE providers and infrastructure experts to develop and validate a common framework for federated access to and analysis of sensitive data. The project combines three complementary perspectives: research Drivers that define and validate requirements; a European community of TRE Providers that brings together operational expertise and practices; and a common Blueprint and Interoperability Framework addressing the architectural, technical, organisational, semantic and legal dimensions required for federation.
This session will use these three perspectives to explore a broader question highly relevant to the EUDAT community: How can Europe move from a landscape of individual trusted environments towards an interoperable, federated and sustainable ecosystem for sensitive-data research?
Short presentations will first examine requirements emerging from EOSC-ENTRUST's cross-domain Drivers and the challenges encountered when research spans multiple TREs and jurisdictions. A provider perspective will then examine common capabilities, differences between operational environments and opportunities for convergence through the EOSC-ENTRUST TRE Provider Forum. A third contribution will introduce the EOSC-ENTRUST Blueprint and Interoperability Framework, including approaches to federated identity and access, secure data processing, auditing and interoperability. A fourth contribution will place these developments within the wider European landscape, considering connections with EOSC Federation, European Data Spaces and established research data and e-infrastructures such as EUDAT.
The presentations will lead into an interactive panel bringing together research communities, TRE providers, architecture experts and representatives of the wider European research infrastructure ecosystem. Rather than presenting federation as purely a technical problem, the panel will consider which capabilities should be common, which should remain local, how trust can operate across organisational boundaries, and what governance and sustainability mechanisms are required for a European network of TREs.
The session directly contributes to the EUDAT Conference 2026 themes of trust, security and sensitive data in RDM, EOSC Federation, integration of services, use cases and user-centric development. It will conclude by identifying concrete opportunities for collaboration between EOSC-ENTRUST, EUDAT, EOSC and other European infrastructures and communities towards making trusted, federated analysis a sustainable component of Europe's research data ecosystem.
Chair
Selim Kalayci
ELIXIR
Agenda
- Introduction and setting the scene
Selim Kalayci (ELIXIR Hub), Jonathan Tedds (ELIXIR Hub) - Drivers: EOSC-ENTRUST Drivers and user requirements
Anne van der Kant (Health-RI) - Providers: EOSC-ENTRUST Provider Forum and operational TRE landscape
Abdulrahman Azab (Sigma2) - Architecture: the EOSC-ENTRUST Blueprint and Interoperability Framework
Miikka Kallberg (CSC) - EOSC-ENTRUST in the European Ecosystem: Where do TREs fit in Europe's emerging federated data infrastructure?
Anssi Kainulainen (CSC) - Interactive Panel session: “From interoperable TREs to a sustainable European trusted-data ecosystem: what needs to happen next?”
All speakers and audience engagement - Closing and synthesis
Selim Kalayci (ELIXIR Hub), Jonathan Tedds (ELIXIR Hub)