Securing Researcher Platforms for Sensitive Data and 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 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 architecture and support perspective there are thousands of other users to look after and this tiny subset of users cannot necessarily justify keeping information technology, security and compliance teams busy for the next 12 months just to establish a complaint workspace environment for a handful of users. 

This is where a deployment of Azure Virtual Desktop, provided 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 a standardised, policy-driven workspace, administered by an organisation that operates to the required controls internally, that can effectively lock down a curated workspace and provide a turn-key experience. 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

By procuring a Secure AVD service via a highly accredited cloud services provider like Macquarie Cloud Services, universities can offload that entire operational headache. Our managed AVD platform is built to Essential 8 L2 and NIST standards by design, monitored 24/7 by security operations specialists, backed by compliance experts who know how to navigate audits and regulatory, and provide an environment that is ring-fenced from other less demanding use-cases.  

Instead of reinventing the wheel internally, universities get a ready-to-go secure collaboration platform that researchers can use immediately. 

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.