Securing Researcher Platforms for Sensitive Data and Collaboration
The Compliance Challenge in Research Collaboration
If you’ve ever been part of a research project that involves collaborating with government departments, you know the drill. Security and compliance requirements are onerous, generally unrewarding, but a necessary evil. For universities embarking on research collaboration with security-conscious government departments, meeting standards like the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential 8 (Maturity Level 2) or NIST standards isn’t optional, it’s a pre-requisite.
Researchers vs. Infrastructure Teams
Researchers don’t want to be compliance administrators, unless, of course, they are security analysts, but I digress. They just want a secure, reliable way to collaborate, share data, and get their work done. That’s fine, but what about the infrastructure teams supporting these workloads?
Essentially, pardon the pun, this is a niche use case. From an infrastructure and support perspective, universities are balancing thousands of users. A small subset of researchers requiring highly secure environments can’t always justify tying up IT, security, and compliance teams for months just to build a compliant workspace.
Why Secure AVD Matters
This is where a deployment of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), delivered by a highly compliant managed services provider, accustomed to providing managed cloud and security services to federal government entities, comes into its own. Instead of researchers working from unmanaged laptops with cobbled-together VPNs, Secure AVD creates:
- Standardised, policy-driven workspaces
- Restricted administrative access
- Turn-key experiences that reduce IT overhead
That way the compliance burden can be almost completely outsourced. Effectively restricting administrative access to the universities business-as-usual administrators and through that, massively reducing the technical resources required to architect, build and support these black sheep research groups.
Built-In Security and Flexibility
Centralised security policies, granular access controls, audit-ready logging and separation of research data and personal devices to keep boundaries clear, are all built into the platform by default. Researchers get the flexibility of logging in from wherever they are, but the compliance team gets peace of mind knowing the workloads are wrapped in governance.
The Ongoing Compliance Burden
Of course, just standing up AVD doesn’t magically tick compliance boxes. Someone has to regularly patch the OS and apps, monitor security posture and respond to alerts, document processes for audits, update configurations when frameworks evolve (and they do). That’s where things can get heavy for a university IT team already stretched across labs, classrooms, and campus networks. Again, for a relatively small user group.
The Managed Security Layer
By baking in a Managed Security aspect to the service, utilising integrated SOC and SIEM with M/XDR, SOAR and comprehensive Cyber Threat Intelligence feeds (forgive the acronym overdoes please) with 24*7 eyes on screens, it’s not just a “secure” sticker on the packet, it’s a comprehensive Secure AVD platform. This is the additional layer that provides granular security event and incident management and remediation, automated or otherwise.
Why Macquarie Cloud Services
By procuring Secure AVD via a highly accredited provider like Macquarie Cloud Services, universities can:
- Offload operational and compliance burdens
- Access a platform designed to Essential 8 L2 and NIST standards
- Rely on 24/7 security operations and compliance specialists
- Provide a ring-fenced secure environment for sensitive research
Instead of reinventing the wheel internally, universities can immediately access a ready-made secure collaboration platform that meets government standards.
Accessing Secure AVD Through CAUDIT
If your university is working with government entities or organisations with similar needs, and you’re feeling the compliance squeeze, there’s no need to build a secure collaboration environment from scratch.
Through the CAUDIT Cloud initiative, Macquarie Cloud Services offers a fully managed, compliance-ready Secure AVD service tailored for research collaboration.
If you are a CAUDIT member, you can already access the portal and add the Secure AVD service with a preferential price.
