Blogs & News
How the Aridhia DRE Measures Up To the SATRE Specification in 2025
In 2024 we ran a series of blogs on the SATRE specification developed by DARE UK. SATRE is the Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments, and it gives TRE providers an open specification to measure their platform against.
We welcomed its emergence as a tool for driving up overall standards in TRE provision, and were happy to be the first commercial TRE provider to score their product against SATRE and make the results publicly available as a whitepaper on the company website (you can find a copy of the 2024 paper here).
The purpose of the exercise was to benchmark the Aridhia DRE against an external specification, and use that to identify gaps in our provision, and while the DRE scored well there were still areas for improvement. Given that, we have rescored the DRE for 2025 and believe that features delivered in the past 12 months have improved our product and consequently our SATRE score.
A fully updated version of the white paper is available here, and details of the specific areas where we improved our score are provided below.
Section 1 – Information Governance
1.2.11 – You should collect and maintain quality management data for measuring the effectiveness of a TRE.
| Year | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Score | 1 | 2 |
What’s changed?
Introduced in 2024, our Tenant Analytics provides DRE hub owners with a wide array of management data about the use of their platform, allowing them to analyse user activity and report on it. Giving them the quality management data they need to measure how effectively the platform is being used.
Section 2 – Computing Technology and Information
2.1.11 – Your TRE should provide tools to encourage best-practice in reproducibly analysing data.
| Year | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Score | 1 | 2 |
What’s changed?
This item requires that a TRE provide users with a means of managing code and software versions. DRE workspaces now offer users two features that allow them to do this. For code management in a workspace, Gitea lets users create repositories which are completely private and local to their workspace to facilitate collaborative code development and document version control. Similarly, our new customer-accessible Azure Container registry makes it easier than ever for workspace users to manage their associated software packages.
Section 3 – Data Management
3.1.13 – Data held within the TRE should be the minimum required for analysis or research.
| Year | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Score | NA | 2 |
What’s changed?
In 2024 we introduced a significant new feature for our data owners: they can now manage connections to external databases via the FAIR UI, or if required, federated analysis software. This makes it easy for data owners to minimise the amount of data held within in the DRE.
March 3, 2025
Ross Stiven
Ross joined the Aridhia Product Team in January 2022. He is the Product Owner for FAIR Data Services, and Aridhia's open source federation project. He works with our customers to understand their needs, and with our Development Team to introduce new features and improve our products. Outside of work, he likes to go hill walking and is slowly working his way through Scotland's Munros.