Getting the most out of the NHS England Secure Data Environment

The following information can help you learn more about what setup would fit your needs. For more information about the features, cost and how to access the SDE, visit the NHS England Secure Data Environment.

Each NHS England SDE user account comes with a cloud-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) providing access to an instance of the Databricks E2 data analytics platform and a suite of supporting tools and capabilities.

Compute power

The compute power (CPU) and memory (RAM) for our standard build is as follows:

2 x virtual CPU, 4GB memory        

If your projects are likely to be more intensive and complex and use tooling such as RStudio and/or Stata, you may need more CPU and/or RAM to support your analysis. We offer three options for expansion:

2 x virtual CPU, 8GB memory*

4 x virtual CPU,16GB memory*

8 x virtual CPU, 32GB memory*

The NHS England SDE hosts a suite of industry-leading tools that support all analytics, reporting and publication requirements, whilst providing powerful options to deliver world class data visualisation and analysis. The tools you access to will depend on your project needs and arrangements.

Standard tools

The following tools are included as standard with all NHS England SDE user accounts and are recommended for most use cases.

Databricks

Databricks is a collaborative analytics platform that supports SQL, Python and R languages for the analysis of big data in the cloud.

GitLab

GitLab is a code management and code version control tool that provides users with a secure, cloud-based repository to store and back-up versions of code.

RStudio

RStudio is a development environment for the R statistical language. It is made by statisticians for statisticians to make your work more productive. 

Additional tooling is available depending on your project needs.

Stata*

Stata is a general-purpose statistical software package for data manipulation, visualisation, statistics, and automated reporting.