Secure Data Exchange: a critical conversation for open data portals

This blog post was co-authored by Lex Du Plessis, Link Digital’s Technical Delivery Manager

Secure Data Exchange (SDE) is a new capability by Link Digital to help data custodians in large organisations, primarily government agencies, exchange data in a completely secure manner across their domain.

The SDE approach, outlined by Link Digital’s Technical Delivery Manager, Lex Du Plessis, in a session at the recent 2024 Canadian Open Data Sumit, comes from our understanding of the challenges involving collaboration, trust, regulatory compliance, accountability and the safeguarding sensitive data, in the evolving open data ecosystem.

Large organisations and governments at all levels are collecting and using data more than ever to increase transparency and inform policy development and service provision. But as the amount of data increases, so too do the challenges of effectively managing and sharing data across its life cycle. These include:

Deriving real insights and benefits from data.
Enabling staff to find the right data for their research or project, quickly and efficiently, ascertain its quality, and identify its custodian.
Sharing data securely.

What is Secure Data Exchange?

SDE is a powerful, flexible, and easy to use approach for data custodians to manage the complete lifecycle of their data across multiple departments, organisational branches, and internal and external users, in a completely controlled access environment.

It offers three things:

Structured data sharing

SDE enables structured and secure data sharing that allows government departments and other large organizations to retain control of their important data while reaping the benefits of collaboration from its sharing.

Access management

SDE provides a streamlined and easy-to-use and interpret dashboard where they can view all data requests, their status (pending, final approval, ended), and all data sharing agreements. This includes the ability to revoke approval to use data.

Customised metadata scheme

A customized metadata scheme is incorporated into the workflow of the SDE system. This complies with the criteria set out in the latest Data Catalog Vocabulary standards, designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs.

SDE won’t solve all the problems facing data custodians in government and other large organisations. But utilising open source software such as CKAN, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, and Drupal, a content management system used to build and manage websites, it can assist large organisations to develop the innovative solutions they require to simplify complex data sharing and delivery across their operations. And because SDE is open source, there are no licensing fees, making it not only an accessible but a cost-effective solution.

SDE can make it easier and more efficient to reuse, evaluate and securely share internal data in one core data platform. It provides an intuitive and simple workflow to manage data requests, negotiate and generate data sharing agreements, grant and revoke data access, and discern patterns of data usage over time and across different levels of operations and functionality.

Conclusion

SDE allows data custodians to see all their data in one place. This ensures that there is one source of truth for the custodian’s data sets and prevents aged or incorrect data from being shared. SDE can assist large organisations to:

Build trust and accountability.
Improve the visibility of who is using data.
Improves data management.

Link Digital can integrate SDE into a data lake, data stores, etc, so that the data sharing agreement is always pointing to the most up-to-date data in core systems. These operations all sit behind corporate Identity Access and Management systems, allowing confidence when users are updated on the core security platform.