Privacy policy at the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI)

Privacy policy at the European Grid Infrastructure                                                  

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a federation of National Grid Initiatives (NGI) and international research institutions such as CERN. It aim is to provide computing resources to researchers and scientists, thereby supporting the vision of an online European Research Area of collaborative-driven innovation.

EGI is a truly transnational organisation, integrating computing resources (about 470,000 logical CPU cores) provided by more than 35 countries from across Europe and beyond. EGI.eu coordinates core common tasks, allowing NGIs to focus on the smart use of resources and of funding that can be invested on a better national infrastructure for their users.

EGI is integrated in the European vision outlined in the Horizon 2020 proposal and contributes actively to promote knowledge transfer and innovation internationally.

EGI is committed to provide secure computing resources for scientists and takes privacy issues seriously. This is especially important for some of the research communities EGI supports, in particular the Life Sciences where some researchers need to guarantee that sensitive data is secured.

The Security Policy Group (one of the policy groups operating within the EGI community) is working on a data privacy policy and is expected to deliver a first draft by the end of the year. Given the transnational nature of EGI as an e-Infrastructure, defining a common privacy policy, complying with the EU Data Protection Directive and spanning multiple countries is a complex issue.

In the context of e-Infrastructures integrated with commercial cloud providers (e.g. the HelixNebula project), EGI is driving the development of privacy standards for federated cloud usage.

For more information, please contact the EGI Strategy & Policy team at: policy@egi.eu