Transforming research data management and storage – the RDE Programme

UNSW has commenced a multi-year program to completely transform research data management and storage. In moving away from legacy, siloed systems developed through incremental and piecemeal development, the program is seeking to establish layers of new services to deliver a unified experience for researchers working with research data.  

The Research Data Experience programme focuses on 4 critical and complementary areas. First, the program will supply the underlying storage infrastructure. This storage must be able to handle data with resilience at a scale and complexity not currently possible at UNSW. This will enable UNSW to handle anticipated data growth in a controlled fashion. Second, the storage must have a layer of management and reporting capabilities to understand how the data is used and reused, retained or disposed of, and to be able to plan for or react to other changes in the wider environment. Third, there is an acute need in certain areas of research to have the ability to handle sensitive data in a trusted research environment. The fourth and final area focuses on the policy settings to capture requirements for compliance and shape services to match, and the people element of tailoring and adopting services.

In this talk we provide an overview of the Research Data Experience as well as progress to date, including architectural approaches, benchmarking, and key learnings.