SATRE 2.0: Evaluating The Updated SATRE Specification
DARE UK announced version 2.0 of the Standard Architecture for Trusted Research Environments (SATRE) specification in July 2026. Aridhia was an early adopter of the specification, and the first commercial organisation to provide a public SATRE score for their platform.
In this post we look at Aridhia's adoption of SATRE, and review the most significant change in SATRE 2.0, the introduction of a Federation pillar to the specification.
Aridhia and SATRE
At Aridhia we have been long-term supporters of the SATRE specification, first providing a public evaluation for the Aridhia Digital Research Environment (DRE) in 2024. We have continued to do this annually and our 2026 evaluation can be found here.
The reasons we adopted SATRE were set out in a presentation to the Safe Data Access Professional Network in March 2026. We like SATRE because it is:
- Open
- Clear
- Not just about technology
Its openness allows for fair comparison between different platforms and providers. In a space with a proliferation of definitions and acronyms (e.g. TRE, SDE, SPE) its granularity brings some much needed clarity to what constitutes a Trusted Research Environment. Finally, and most importantly, it goes beyond the technical solution and details the financial and organisational requirements of successfully maintaining a TRE.
Scoring the DRE against SATRE provides us with a useful internal measure of our product, and also a valuable tool for external communications, making it easier to explain what a TRE is and how the Aridhia DRE fills that requirement.
At the end of the presentation I identified what we saw as the important gaps in the specification as it then stood. These were the integration of AI capabilities within TREs and the adoption of federated data analysis, and the latter of these has been addressed comprehensively in SATRE 2.0.
SATRE 2.0 – Data Federation
SATRE 1.0 had four pillars:
- Information Governance
- Computing Technology and Information Security
- Data Management
- Supporting Capabilities
Each of these covers a different aspect of the provision of a stand-alone TRE. They are all broken into sub-sections and then individual line items which platform providers can score themselves against.
SATRE version 2.0 introduces a new pillar, Federation:
Where previous versions of SATRE focused on what happens inside a single TRE, SATRE 2.0 tackles the thornier question of what happens when TREs need to work together. Providing researchers with access to data across organisational boundaries while maintaining the same rigorous standards of safety and control.
- Tim Machin, DARE UK Blog
This makes the Federation pillar fundamentally different from the others. The four original pillars relate to the provision of a TRE by a single organisation, the Federation pillar is about the relationship between multiple TREs in a federated network.
The Federation pillar is structured the same way as the others and has the following sub-sections:
- Federation Governance
- Federation Accreditation
- Federation Study Management
- Federation Information Security
- Federation Infrastructure Management
- Federation Data Management
- Federation Financial Management
In many ways these echo the content of the original pillars: the importance of defining roles and procedures, a requirement for security and audit, ensuring that legal and ethical standards are adhered to.
From our practical experience of establishing federated networks we find little to disagree with in the content of the new pillar. Agreeing common standards and ensuring they are adhered to are critical to the success of any federated network. However, we do think it would make sense to have a clearer distinction between the new Federation pillar which assesses the maturity of a federated network of TREs, and the existing pillars which score the maturity of a particular TRE.
We will continue to score the DRE against the SATRE specification annually. If you would like to know more about this please contact us here.