Single sign-on to secure project data
Huge science facility uses new system to organise experiment information
Diamond Light Source, the government’s largest science project for 30 years, is using single sign-on technology to secure data used by business and academia.
The £250m facility will work on mapping virus genomes, tracing pollutants in the environment, superconductivity and nanotechnology.
It will use single sign-on based on Microsoft Active Directory to ensure sensitive commercial data collected by clients using its high-tech scanner cannot be accessed by unauthorised users.
Diamond Light Source, which will go live in January, is based around a synchrotron, a machine that generates an extremely intense X-ray beam to examine materials at the atomic level, creating huge amounts of data.
Organising the mass of information to make sure it is owned by the right people is a major logistical exercise, says Bill Pulford, the project’s data acquisition group leader.
‘When an organisation comes here to do an experiment they will be given a unique group identifier that will allow them to get access to all the data generated from their experiment, and make sure they are the only ones who can access it,’ he said.
Each experiment conducted using the synchrotron will generate more than 2TB of data a day, with up to 35 experiments going on simultaneously.
Butler Group analyst Andy Kellett warned: ‘Single sign-on for its own sake is not the final answer. It can make your organisation less secure, opening up doors into the system that were not there before.’
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