Data Sharing With Globus

With Globus, subscribers can easily and securely share data with the people who need it—without requiring you to create temporary accounts or transfer your data to an external storage system.

Why Use Globus to Share Data?

• Enhance collaboration with other researchers, without requiring them to have accounts on your system.
• Save money and improve security by avoiding duplication of your (potentially sensitive) data on cloud storage.
• Save time by letting Globus optimize and monitor transfers between collaborators’ systems—using fast research networks when available.

Most file sharing services require you to copy your data to an external storage system that they manage—usually hosted in the cloud. This sharing model is reasonable for a few megabytes of data, but can be cumbersome, slow, and expensive for big research data.

With Globus, you don’t have to move your data in order to share it. Any storage system covered by your Globus subscription, including public clouds like Google Drive and Amazon S3, can be easily configured to allow secure data sharing directly by users of the system. Once configured, you can select directory paths to be securely shared with offsite collaborators and grant them read-only or read-write access. Globus lets you share your data without requiring temporary accounts for your collaborators on the system where the data resides.

Your collaborators receive an email with a link to the shared directory paths, and can then use Globus to transfer data from/to your storage system directly, without taking a detour through a third-party cloud storage provider.

Globus uses widely-adopted industry standards such as OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for authentication/authorization, and uses trusted protocols such GridFTP and HTTPS. Globus recognizes that administrators need to configure their systems for sharing in a secure manner, and provides the tools to easily do so. Globus also supports management of protected data such as HIPAA-regulated data.

Data sharing is a premium feature available with a Globus Subscription.

Globus Groups

Globus lowers barriers to collaboration by letting users create and configure secure Globus groups. You can create a Globus group for your collaboration, use the group to control access to shared data, and update membership at any time.

Globus groups, like Globus accounts, are consistent across all systems connected to Globus. Globus supports subgroup hierarchies, group and member visibility policies, and customizable group admission and member verification workflows.