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SATRE 2026: Computing Technology and Information Security

Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments (SATRE) is a DARE UK driver project to support the development of a secure reference architecture for Trusted Research Environments (TRE), allowing research teams to benchmark their own TRE against an open specification.

Aridhia was an early adopter of the specification, and the first commercial TRE provider to score itself against it in 2024, and we rescored our platform in 2025. This blog series details our rescore for 2026, covering each section of SATRE in turn.

In this blog we’ll cover our score for the Computing Technology and Information Security section of SATRE.

What is Computing Technology and Information Security in SATRE?

The Computing Technology and Information Security section provides the main technical component of the SATRE specification.

It covers the deployment, configuration and maintenance of TRE infrastructure, and the computing power that should be available to users. For software it specifies ease of access and use, and the kind of tooling that should be available to users, and the sorts of programmatic security measures that should be in place to stop data misuse.

2025 Computing Technology and Information Security

In 2025 we scored the DRE at 119 out of 122 for this section, and provided the following reasons for this score:

• Aridhia DRE Workspaces provide a secure compute environment with inbound and outbound airlock review and approval processes.
• Data cannot be copied out of a workspace to a local desktop, data can only leave the workspace via an approved and audited airlock request.
• The workspaces come with a Postgres database, over twenty bioinformatics analysis modules, an R development environment and Jupyter Lab built in, and an extensible framework to allow easy admin approved tool deployment, without the need to use a virtual machine.
• Virtual machines are updated with security updates routinely as is the supporting TRE infrastructure.

What has changed in 2026?

We have increased our score in this section in 2026 by one point, and are now scoring the DRE at 120 out of 122.

Previously users had a somewhat restricted and audited ability to cut and paste data from a workspace, this has been improved by introducing a new video streaming technology for all in built containerised apps and collabora online software. This allows for ‘copy in’ but prevents ‘copy out’ to the desktop.